


The Other Was a Star-Shaped Hole

by lightning and a lightning bug (spoons)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Angst, Big Bang Challenge, Self-Harm, dark themes, long fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 09:27:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoons/pseuds/lightning%20and%20a%20lightning%20bug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU following the end of the fifth season. Dean finds a way to pull Sam out of Hell, and now all they want is for things to be over. For them to be safe. But both brothers have secrets they aren't sharing, and it takes several attacks from never-before-seen creatures— including strangely Hollywood-like zombies— to make them admit things aren't quite as perfect as they've been pretending. Sam reveals he still has a piece of Hell trapped inside his mind, and it's clear Hell is set on getting it back. He and Dean resolve to make a stand, but even that isn't as simple as it seems. The struggle not only takes an immense toll on Sam's mind and body, it also starts changing his relationship with Dean. There's a price to be paid for every victory, and the Winchesters find themselves paying their worst one yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the SPN Big Bang. To check out the full thing with its related art, you can go here:  
> http://spoons1899.livejournal.com/137029.html
> 
> Thanks for reading!

When Sam wakes up, it’s dark, and the air is screaming.

_Wrong,_ his mind tells him. _This is wrong._

Hands clutch at his chest and Sam shoves them aside. They want his heart. He knows because he can feel it beating inside his chest where it hasn’t beat for a long time.

The screams want inside his head, his mind. It’s been pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle with too many corners, but like always he can feel all the places where the edges don’t touch.

Something says his name, and that’s enough. They know how to break him like it’s the highest art form, delicate and visceral and demanding no less than perfection. But when they make him whole like this, when they give him back this small shred of himself, he’s just flawed enough to fight them off, if only for a moment.

The hands come again and Sam bites, claws, uses every bit of the animal they’ve forced him to become. He rages like he hasn’t for centuries, because something is different this time.

He lashes out, strikes through the voices, and there’s blood. His blood, which he hasn’t shed in years. It drips down his hands and wrists, and Sam can feel it in his heart and his eyes and under his skin. He’s never gotten this far before. They always stop him after that first taste of something more than them, his destruction all the more agonizing when he can remember what it was like to be a living being.

But something is different this time.

Sam gets his hands around bones and his teeth through flesh, and the screaming goes on but he can breathe now, deep heaving breaths with lungs he remembers how to use.

They really must be losing him this time, because they do something new and they and show him a face. It’s bloody and mangled and missing pieces, almost to a point past recognition, except there’s nothing that could be done to this face that would stop Sam from recognizing it. Its one open eye is terrified and its mouth is desperate, pleading…

But Sam has his own eyes and mouth back where they belong now so he shuts both of them. He will not admit this, will not accept what they want him to see.

And just like that, the air falls silent. The hands disappear. Sam can hear his own breathing and feel his own body. When he opens his eyes, the face that greets him is whole and alive.

There’s a name resting on Sam’s tongue, heavy and bright like a copper penny. He’s kept it inside for years, kept it inside while everything else was cut away and drained out. But Sam has his teeth and tongue and all the pieces back in place and the edges are holding, so after an eternity he lets it out.

“Dean.”

“Sammy.” Dean is gasping, choking, throat closing around his words like he’s dying and being reborn just to say them, and Sam thinks its beautiful. He fills his ears with the sound of his own name, tangled up in love and horror.

He forgets the sound of screams, and he hugs his brother.

***

Sam isn’t surprised when he’s finally cognizant enough to realize he’s at Bobby’s house. It feels right, coming back from the dead to the place that’s become something like a home. He tells this to Dean, but it makes Dean’s face get pinched and sad. Maybe it’s because they’re in the panic room, but that too feels right to Sam. It would be nice if it were an actual panic room where they locked the monsters out instead of locking them in. If this were a place where hiding from the world and truly panicking about the dangers beyond the locked door was allowed, Sam thinks he and Dean might have spent most of their lives in here, growing up to the sound of the slowly rotating fan, making games of the patterns pressed into the walls.

Of course, having a place to lock up monsters has come in handy. Sam’s not sure who deserves to be in here more: himself, who’s risen from the dead with the taste of Hell on his tongue, or Dean, who made it happen.

“Don’t ask me how,” Dean pleads quietly as he wipes Sam down with a warm cloth, fast, efficient strokes. It’s like being a little kid again, cleaned up for bedtime, for school, dirt and scrapes vanishing under his big brother’s hands. “Please, Sammy, don’t ask me.”

“I won’t,” says Sam, and he doesn’t. He lies back and lets Dean run the cloth over his hands and between each of his fingers, washing away the invisible blood Sam can still feel burning on his skin. “Don’t ask me what I remember from Hell.”

“What do you remember from Hell?” Dean says promptly, and Sam smiles, because this is a game he’s familiar with, the first time in a long time where he knows all the rules and even gets to touch the dice. After everything, Dean is still Dean and between them they’ve still got the push-pull down to such a science they might as well be the inventors of tug-o-war. 

The comfort of it hits Sam like a blow to the chest and for a moment he feels sick. Little things with too many legs and not enough eyes start scrabbling at the edges of his brain, whispers and poisons dripping from fangs inside gaping mouths. The corners of the room go dark and it flickers into a horror scene, furniture broken, blood smeared across the walls. Dean looks up at Sam’s hiss of breath, and even he isn’t spared. His gaze is glassy, lifeless, his skin shredded to ribbons with the bone shining blue-white between the gashes, chest cracked open and fluids pooling around his feet.

Sam closes his eyes and takes another breath, forcing the creatures back into the putrid pits and hidden crevasses where they came from. 

“I don’t remember much,” Sam tells Dean when he feels it’s safe to open his eyes again. The room swims into view, clean and quiet and safe. Perfect for panicking.

“Okay.” Dean’s voice shakes but his fingers encircle Sam’s wrist, clamping tight and sure over the pulse point. Because of course Winchesters don’t panic. They don’t abandon each other, they don’t stay dead, and they don’t talk about the things that try to rip them apart. “That’s good, Sammy.”

They sit in silence then, and there is nothing to keep track of the time but their steady breaths and the beat of Sam’s blood where it pushes his skin into Dean’s. It goes on for what could be hours, or days, or the time it takes for Dean to switch ancient cassette tapes while Sam reads travel-worn maps and declares, no this is the smallest town they’ve even been in.

Sam has a thousand questions, but Dean doesn’t look like a man with many answers. His fingertips are stained black and his fingernails are bitten down to the quick— a childhood habit he swears he grew out of but never really did. He has several days scruff on his face, and there are wrinkles next to his eyes. The last observation is what makes Sam stare. Those little lines, those tiny creases in the freckled skin— they mean Dean is growing old.

It’s something Sam often pictured but deep down never expected to see, because their kind of life comes with an early expiration date, and despite the number of times they’ve sidestepped it, their luck can’t possibly hold. And yet here they are, in their world of monsters and demons and constant sacrifice, and after all their near-death experiences and post-death experiences and mid-death experiences, Sam is out of Hell, and Dean is growing old.

The thought is enough to make Sam put aside all his questions except the easiest one.

“Dean,” he says, and Dean looks up, disbelieving and hopeful and a little bit wild. “Can we go upstairs?”

“Sure, Sammy.” The agreeableness with lack of accompanying insult is unusual, but Sam isn’t going to question it. As sick as it is they’ve got a rhythm now for when one of them comes back from the dead, and Sam is pretty sure they’re still in the grace period where they’re allowed to be extra nice to each other.

Dean leaps to his feet as Sam makes to stand. His hands flutter anxiously at the level of his chest like he’s not sure where to put them, but they clamp instantly to Sam’s shoulders the second he beings to sway.

“Um,” Sam mumbles inarticulately as the room blurs and spins and he loses track of his feet. “You might have to help me.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, because Dean has been helping Sam for his whole goddamn life without once being asked, and this time is no exception. He seizes Sam’s wrist with one hand and pulls it across his shoulders, putting his other arm around Sam’s waist. Together they hobble out of the panic room, the winning entry in the world’s most fucked-up three-legged race.

Crossing the raised threshold of the room is a bit of a challenge; Sam’s feet catch on the edge but Dean lifts him, clumsy and all the more determined because of it. Sam feels weighed down and exhausted, lingering thoughts of Hell mixing with the growing doubts in his mind. ( _He had the Devil inside him, you don’t just come back from something like that, maybe he shouldn’t have come back from that)_. With every step up the stairs he feels two seconds away from crashing all the way back down.

Only Dean won’t let him fall. Sam can feel it in Dean’s grip, in the way he holds on a little too tightly and tilts his head just enough to keep his temple brushing Sam’s cheek. Sam can hear the words Dean is pressing into his skin as clearly as if Dean were screaming them for the world to hear.

_Never again._

They reach the top of the stairs at last and Dean takes Sam to the study. It’s exactly as Sam hoped he could remember, right down to Bobby startling awake in his armchair and looking around wildly. Dean tries to steer Sam towards the couch but he pulls away and stumbles until he can catch himself against the side of the desk and put his arms around Bobby’s shoulders.

“I can’t believe you’re alive,” he mutters into his own shirtsleeve. He hasn’t cried yet but there is where he gets close, breathing in the scent of motor oil and cheap whiskey from the neck he felt Lucifer break like it was nothing more than a Popsicle stick.

“No thanks to you,” Bobby answers gruffly, and Sam laughs, giddy and desperate. His chest feels like it’s going to snap with how much he wants to keep this. 

“You should eat something,” Dean says, pulling him back from Bobby then crowding in close as though any inch of space between them is an inch too much. “You’ve gotta be hungry.”

“No.” Sam hasn’t thought of food for decades. He’s not sure of the rules of this newly returned body, and though he’s pretty positive he could eat right now there’s someone else he needs to see first.

Dean says his name, fast and worried, when Sam lurches towards the front door, but he lets him get all the way to the porch before putting a hand on his arm. Sam casts him a slightly desperate look, unable to put this need into reasonable words, doubting the English language even has the right ones. Dean responds with a smile, because he understands, of _course_ he understands.

“Look left,” he says. 

Sam whips his head around, and there she is, clean and whole, chrome fixtures and black body burnished orange by the setting sun. Sam might even describe her glow as heavenly only he doesn’t consider that much of a compliment anymore and the Impala’s always had a grace that’s all her own.

He plunges down the steps and across the yard, still-uncoordinated feet sending up showers of gravel like tiny hailstorms. Dean trails behind him, ready to help at a second’s notice, but letting Sam have this moment. He gets his hands on the Impala’s hood first, imagines the heat pouring off it is from the engine, still warm after a cross-continental drive where the sun sticks to Dean’s skin and Sam catches the wind in his teeth. He wants to spread himself across the smooth black metal, cover it and sink into it until he is as much a part of the car as it is a part of him.

He does the next best thing and opens the passenger side door and slides inside. He feels like he did the first time he rode in the car after being at Stanford, half-hoping and half-terrified the worn leather will have lost the shape of his body.

The seat curves around him perfectly, like always, like it was made to fit him. Or maybe he was made to fit it. He spent so much of his life in this car he wouldn’t be surprised if his body grew to match its curves and angles, like a vine that winds itself around the trunk of a tree.

The driver’s side door opens. Dean gets in, and this is the point where Sam loses it. He checked the odometer; he knows she’s barely been driven since he leapt into Hell with the Devil inside him. Dean is saying, “I couldn’t, Sammy, I just couldn’t” and Sam is crying so hard his lungs hurt. 

Dean gets his hand on the back of his neck and Sam crashes forward, face colliding with the leather seat and the side of Dean’s thigh. He stays that way, tears soaking into faded denim while he sucks in the taste of leather with every broken gasp. Dean keeps his hand on Sam’s head, rubbing his neck, running fingers through his hair.

It’s awkward and messy and Sam finally feels like he’s home. 

He falls asleep for the first time since he said yes to Lucifer, and he does it right there in the car. Dean doesn’t try to wake him, or move him. In fact, Sam is pretty sure he sleeps too, one hand on Sam and one on the wheel as if he’s already driving, moving them through the dark streets and lost plains of the world. 

They leave the next morning.

Dean keeps asking if Sam wants to stay, if he’s sure he’s up to traveling, but Sam insists. There’s nothing he wants more right now than to be on the road watching all the places they’ve been fall away in the rearview mirror.

They say good-bye to a weary but understanding Bobby, and Dean gathers up his few possessions that he managed, as usual, to scatter all over the house.

“Guess I’ll have to go shopping,” Sam muses as he watches Dean retrieve a shirt from beneath the bed.

Dean grunts noncommittally, and mutters, “Might still have a few things of yours” to the dusty floorboards.

Later, when they’re packing the weapons into the trunk, Sam spots his old bag in the footwell of the backseat. He opens it to find everything he kept in it before that day in the cemetery still inside, right down to his toiletry bag, shampoo dried and crusting beneath its cap, tiny hairs still clinging to the blades of his razor. He doesn’t mention it to Dean, but the sight of it makes him sad.

By contrast, Dean starts grinning the moment he turns the key in the ignition. He throws Sam a look of such manic joy he might as well have been the one who was reborn, the one given a second— or in their case ninth or tenth— chance at life.

_This is it,_ Sam thinks. _This is what Dean needs to be happy._ The car, the road, the limitless sky, and Sam, seated by his side.

The dark corners of Sam’s mind surge, broken hands clawing their way out to scratch against the back of his eyeballs and remind him of how many times he’s left Dean, turned his back and walked away, sucked demons down his throat and shut his eyes, let the Devil through his skin and jumped into Hell.

Sam pushes the hands away, forcing his stinging eyes to focus on Dean as he looks right this second, hands on wheel, early morning sun brushing the side of his face and dipping into the sliver of a grin that still clings to the corner of his mouth. Sam has the sudden urge to put his fingers there, to push against that little curve until he can pretend he’s living in a world where he hasn’t seen someone’s flesh melt off their bones.

“You always thought it was cool when it happened in _Raiders,_ ” Sam tells Dean, speaking to drown out the sound of insects buzzing inside his skull. “But it’s really not.”

“What?” Dean’s smile vanishes as he casts Sam a worried look. “Sammy, you feeling alright?”

Sam tries to nod and shake the insects from his head at the same time, and he must look like enough of a freak that Dean slaps a hand to his forehead, asking if he’s feeling feverish. Sam rears back with a hiss.

“Jesus, Dean, your hands are freezing!”

Dean ignores him, groping his neck to find a pulse, but Sam shakes him off. So there’s a bit of Hell apparently still lodged in his brain. He’s not the one about to lose a finger due to poor circulation.

Sam’s pretty sure he saw some gloves in the backseat, so he arches up and leans over the back, stretching out his arms and feeling around the floor. The car swerves slightly and an icy hand clamps to Sam’s thigh, yanking him back down.

“Knock it off,” Dean growls in what Sam used to refer to as his “Dad-voice”— the voice Dean uses when he expects to be obeyed. He gives Sam’s thigh a final, sharp squeeze that makes him shiver slightly, no doubt due to the cold from Dean’s hand bleeding through his jeans.

“Don’t blame me if you can’t uncurl your fingers from the wheel later and I have to cut them off with my bowie knife,” Sam retaliates in what Dean used to call his “pouty princess” voice— the one he uses when he has no intention of defying Dean but wants to keep up the illusion that he might. His heart isn’t really in the taunt however. Leaning into the backseat afforded him with another look of his almost fetishistically preserved duffle, positioned just the way he left it. If he had to guess, he would say it hadn’t been moved since Sam last put it there himself. 

He lets a few miles pass in silence, then asks quietly, “Did you even try?”

“What?” Dean looks concerned again, and Sam supposes he should start prefacing his thoughts with a little more explanation to seem a little less crazy.

“You said you’d go to Lisa’s after—” Dean’s hands tighten convulsively around the wheel. Sam hesitates, turns it into a cough. “… After. But she’s not here, and I am, so…”

“You want me to apologize for getting you out of Hell?” Dean snaps, and Sam sighs because he should have known Dean would get defensive.

“No, I just wanted you to be happy, Dean. I didn’t want you to be obsessed with trying to get me out, I wanted you to be free to live your life—”

“Christ, Sam!” Dean slams on the breaks so hard they’re both forced to brace themselves with a hand against the dashboard. Dean rounds on him the second the tires stop screeching, his eyes holding the same wild look they did in the panic room. “When are you going to figure it out? _You_ are my life, you dumbass. I went to Ben and Lisa, but only because I promised _you._ And I was there for a year, a whole fucking year.”

“Okay.” Sam puts his hands up like he’s dealing with a wild animal but Dean slaps them aside, seizing a fistful of Sam’s shirt and dragging him forward. Sam flinches, almost positive Dean is about to punch him.

“You want to know how that perfect little suburban life went without you there, Sammy?” Dean snarls. “On the nights I wasn’t balls-deep in the occult and terrifying the shit out of the neighbors, I was drinking myself half to death and trying to make deals with demons so at least I could make it into the cage with you if I ate my own gun.”

“Stop, Dean, please,” Sam asks, voice shaking. This has always been the most terrifying thing about his brother, the fierceness of his love. Dean’s been trained to kill things since his age was a single digit, but he’s never more dangerous than when he’s fighting for his family.

“I got you out of Hell, Sammy,” Dean continues, voice dropping to deadly soft. “Because it was the _only thing_ I could do.”

“How? Sam whispers. “How did you do it?” He and Dean are nose-to-nose now, and Sam tries to read the truth in his brother’s eyes. He wants to know what price Dean paid. Because there is always a price to be paid. But Dean’s eyes go cold and he releases his hold on Sam’s shirt, withdrawing back to his side of the car.

“You said you weren’t going to ask me that.”

“I know, but Dean—”

“No, Sammy.” Dean twists the keys and the Impala roars back to life. It makes Sam jump— he’s forgotten they were having this conversation while stopped in the middle of a thankfully deserted highway. The world has a tendency to stop when Dean looks at him like that. “You’re not in Hell, you’re alive, I’m alive. That’s enough, you hear me? We’re going to be happy with this.”

“Sure, yeah.” Sam goes quiet for a few minutes, but he can’t stop thinking of Dean dreaming of picnics and baseball tournaments, of the way he used to take care of Sam, of his Dad-voice. “But if you wanted, now that I’m alive, if you wanted to go back—”

“Swear to God, Sam.” Dean shakes his head, but this time he’s almost smiling. “You’re like a dog with a fucking bone. Just let it go, okay? I’m right where I want to be.”

“Okay.” Sam feels suddenly very young, like when he used to annoy Dean until he provoked an outburst that inevitably left Sam stifling hurt tears and Dean apologizing with a wrecked look on his face. Sam used to hug Dean then, to say he was sorry for being such a pest and he forgave Dean for yelling at him. He kind of feels like doing that now, but he’s pretty sure Dean would crash the car out of shock if Sam suddenly flung his arms around him. Still, he feels like he’s missing something, so he says,

“I’m right where I want to be, too.”

“Damn right you are, bitch,” Dean counters easily, but his grin returns, and it’s brighter than the sun rising in their limitless sky.

***

By mutual, unspoken agreement, they drive as far as the daylight takes them, then they pull into the parking lot of cheap roadside motel. Dean kills the engine, but neither of them make a move to get out.

“This okay?” Dean asks after several minutes. Sam nods, staring at the neon pink Vacancy sign.

“It’s weird but, from what I can remember… I think I missed this, you know?”

“Yeah.” Dean is watching the sign too. The garish light flickers over them both, lighting the inside of the Impala like a cheap strip club but somehow managing to look soft and almost romantic where it touches the curves of Dean’s face. His voice carries the weight of the year Sam doesn’t think he’ll be able to ask about again. “I know.”

Dean goes to the office to get them a room, and Sam zones out in the passenger seat, taking deep breaths and trying to ignore the tiny hairy things scrabbling at the edges of his consciousness. He’s just tired, that’s all. The voices in the back of his head chanting in a language that burns cold like liquid nitrogen will stop once he gets some sleep. Sam’s sure of it.

Dean raps on his window, startling him from his stupor. He’s clumsy and useless climbing from the car, suddenly barely able to lift his bag. The entire way across the parking lot Sam feels like a weight is pushing on his shoulders, making him trip over the curb and practically fall face first into the door of their room.

“I’m just tired,” he says in response to Dean’s look, and though it’s obvious he’s lying and it’s obvious Dean doesn’t believe him, they both pretend otherwise.

The motel room is one of the nicer ones they’ve ever stayed in, with a kitchenette, a table and four chairs, two queen beds, carpet free of stains, and a television that looks like it might even have cable. To most anyone else, it would have been adequate, but to the two of them it’s well past decent and even edging close to nice. They’re both checking it out and trying not to smile like idiots, but when they catch each other’s gaze they can’t help it.

“There aren’t even fish or trees or dolls painted on the wall,” Dean says as dumps his stuff on the closest bed then flops down beside it. “In fact, I think the fleur-de-lis add a bit of class.”

“Fleur-de-lis?” Sam takes another look at the pattern on the wallpaper, surprised as always by the extent and unpredictability of Dean’s trivia-like knowledge base. “Really, Dean?”

“What? That’s what they’re called.” Dean grabs the remote from the nightstand and flicks on the television, crowing in delight when he discovers it goes past four channels. He surfs enthusiastically for a while before settling on a Jack Nicholson movie, then looks at up Sam who realizes he’s still standing like an idiot by the door, just watching his brother.

“Oh, sorry. Did you want to go to sleep?”

“No, it’s okay.” Sam shakes himself and moves across the room to the other bed, thankful that Dean doesn’t seem like he’s going to tease him about his newly developed stalker tendencies. He kicks off his boots then lays down fully clothed. He wants to watch the movie with Dean, but he can’t seem to focus. He keeps telling himself this is good, this is right, this is why he jumped into the Pit and stopped the Apocalypse, so he could watch cable movies in a motel room with his brother.

But something feels off, and Sam can’t settle. The voices in his head are bubbling like acid, some of it leaking into his eyes and making his vision go hazy. He stops trying to watch the screen and watches Dean instead, stalkerness be damned. He focuses on Dean’s relaxed posture— ankles crossed, hands folded, back to the headboard— and the small smile playing around his mouth. Dean looks content, happy, and Sam wants nothing more than to close his eyes and let that be the last thing he sees before he sleeps. But it’s in between blinks that the acid in his mind shows him Dean looking mangled, looking dead.

Sam can’t fall asleep when he can see Dean with a hole blasted through his chest and his mouth leaking blood. He can’t even lie here, can hardly stay in his own skin. He sits up and swings his legs to the floor, scooting forward until his knees are almost touching Dean’s bed.

“Dean,” he says, and some of his urgency must be in his voice because Dean immediately sits up straight and shuts off the television.

“Sammy, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t… I can’t…” Sam has no idea how to put into words the churning sensation in his stomach that makes him want to grab a hold of something before he flies apart. “I _need_ …”

“What, Sammy?”

That something becomes Dean when he slides to the edge of his bed, legs slotting between Sam’s as Dean mirrors his position. Sam seizes his arms, digs his fingers in to feels Dean’s skin, his warmth, his blood rushing strong and sure through his veins.

“Tell me you’re okay,” Sam rasps. “Tell me I’m okay. Tell me—”

A blinding, stabbing pain rockets through Sam’s head from temple to temple and he falls forward like a stone, forehead crashing into Dean’s shoulder. Dean shouts his name and tries to get his hands on Sam, and that’s when someone bangs on their window.

“What the hell?” Dean jerks back, one hand going automatically to the firearm stashed beneath his pillow. Sam pulls himself up as well, the pain in his head suppressed by his confusion. Silhouetted against the dim light filtering in from the parking lot is a man, one arm bent at the elbow and resting on their window. As they stare at him, he raises his arm and lets it fall back down, hard enough to rattle the glass.

“Jesus.” Dean gets to his feet, bracing one hand on Sam’s shoulder until he’s sure Sam can sit on his own, then moving away towards the window. “Listen, pal, I think you’ve got the wrong room, so why don’t you just—”

This time the man’s arm shatters the window and his entire upper body, propelled by the momentum, flops over into their room. Dean swears again as he dodges the spray of glass, then again as he stares down at the weakly struggling man lying half inside their room.

“Is he drunk?” Sam asks.

“Fuck if I know.” Dean leans forward and prods the guy’s arm with his pistol. “Hey. Hey, get up, come on man.”

The guy groans and finally gets his hands under himself enough to start climbing to his feet. Sam chokes on a shout as the broken glass still clinging to the windowsill goes into the guy’s palms. He must be blitzed out of his mind on _something_ Sam decides, because he apparently doesn’t even feel the pain as one particularly sharp piece of glass goes all the way through his hand and comes out the other side.

Then the guy lifts his head and Sam shouts for real. He’s seen enough week-old corpses in his lifetime to know this guy looks _exactly_ like one. His skin is grey-green and sagging on his bones, little cuts from the glass flapping open and bloodless. One of his eyes is missing, leaving behind a dark socket gaping like a second mouth; the other is milked over and sightless.

“Is that… is that what I think it is?” Dean asks as the corpse climbs unsteadily over the windowsill, heedless of the strips of skin it’s leaving behind caught in the shards of glass.

“Shoot it!” Sam yells as the thing cocks its head and takes a jerky step forward. “Fucking shoot it!”

He dives for his own bag while Dean fires off three neat shots, two to its chest and one directly in the middle of its forehead. The thing hardly slows down, raising glass-studded hands towards Dean.

“Bullets are useless!” Dean chucks his gun on the bed, hastily retreating across the room. “Please tell me you got some rock salt ready, Sammy!”

“Coming right up.” Sam cocks the shotgun and blasts a round straight into the thing’s ribcage. It reels backwards, hands flailing wildly for a moment, before righting itself and stumbling another few feet in their direction.

“Silver?” Dean bellows, ducking away from its grasping hands and aiming a kick to its knee. The sound of a kneecap shattering is the same for a living person as it is for a dead person, but with a living person the sound is usually accompanied by a chorus of screams. The thing still heading inexorably towards Dean merely lets out a groan that sounds more frustrated than anything.

Sam finally gets his hand on a silver knife and hurls it with all the accuracy his Dad ever taught him, lodging it deep in the thing’s back right where its heart should be.

“Okay, so silver does jack shit too!” Dean shouts, adding, “Fuck!” when the punch he lands on the thing’s jaw only succeeds in knocking the bone sideways and leaving it dangling there like a broken marionette. “Any other ideas?”

Sam considers suggesting they lead the thing out into the parking lot and try out every weapon in their arsenal, and if that fails run the thing over until all its bones are broken and it can’t do anything but lie in a big fleshy puddle on the pavement— but then Dean is yelling as the thing wraps a glass-spiked hand around his forearm, and all of Sam’s capacity for rational thought flies right out their broken window.

He lunges forward and seizes the thing by its shoulders. Huge chunks of rotting skin and muscle come off beneath his hands but Sam ignores them, digging in until his fingers hit bone. He hauls the thing off Dean and throws it into the wall. It hits with a thick, wet sound but remarkably manages to stay on its feet. Moving with surprising agility, it gets its hands around Sam’s throat. Sam chokes, both from the glass pricking his skin and the suddenly immense pressure on his windpipe. He grasps at the thing’s forearms, but his hands slip in the disintegrating skin and this time he can’t manage a firm grip. His vision starts to go black, his headache ratcheting back up, and something hot pulses behind his eyes. Sam’s not sure if he’s about to black out or explode like a nuclear reactor.

Apparently it’s the former because his knees choose that moment to give out, and he’s left starting up into a rotting, sightless face as it descends towards him, mouth and empty eye socket open and black like they’re ready to swallow him whole.

There’s a whistling sound, and the face disappears. The hands follow, falling away from his neck as the body topples backward, hits the dresser, and lies still, its head lying several feet away.

Sam sucks in a desperate breath and looks up to find Dean standing above him like some sort of heroic statue, machete clutched between his outstretched hands.

“Decapitation,” he says with a strangely aborted shrug. “Always works in Romero movies.” Then he’s laughing breathlessly and dropping to his knees among the bits of skin and innards scattered on the floor, hands going immediately to check the wounds on Sam’s neck.

Sam doesn’t know whether to laugh with him or burst into tears over the fact that it’s his _second night_ being back from Hell and already they’ve both almost been killed by some creature they’ve never seen before. So he drops his head onto Dean’s shoulder where his headache is a little less intense and lets Dean trace gentle patterns around his throat.

“Holy shit, Sammy,” Dean mutters in his ear, voice still sparking with laughter and adrenaline. “Did we just kill a zombie?”


	2. Chapter 2

“A zombie, a _real_ zombie.” Dean is ecstatic, grinning like he’s a normal little kid who’s been told both his birthday and Christmas are coming early.

“I’m glad you’re so excited,” Sam answers drily as he retrieves the jawbone from where it separated from the head and slid into the kitchen, adding it to the garbage bag. “But would you mind turning some of that excitement into helping me clean this up?”

“I think you got it.” Dean nudges a stray bit of muscle with his foot and makes a face. Sam sighs. When it comes to movies, Dean is convinced the bloodier the better. He even liked the overly graphic surgery scenes in _Dr. Sexy M.D._ and laughed at Sam when he blanched and had to turn away. But when it comes to real life Dean often proves the more squeamish one, and Sam ends up holding the autopsy saw or the severed limps or, in this case, the zombie jaw.

“But a _real_ zombie,” Dean repeats. “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“I know.” Sam sits back on his heels with a thought that’s been gnawing at him since he first woke up crawling its way the front of his mind. “Dean. It… it worked, didn’t it? What I did?”

“What do you mean?” Dean’s joy vanishes at the serious tone in Sam’s voice, and Sam hates that he’s the one to take it away, that he’s always the one taking Dean’s happiness away. He looks down at his hands, dirty with blood.

“Did I stop the Apocalypse?”

“Yes.” Dean’s voice softens and he sits down on the edge of his bed, bringing his face almost level with Sam’s. “You stopped it, Sammy. You saved the world.”

The pride in Dean’s voice is so strong Sam doesn’t dare look up, because he knows if he does and sees the same amount of pride in Dean’s eyes he’s bound lose his shit and he’s already acted like enough of a headcase for one night. 

“Okay,” Sam says quietly, swallowing once or twice just to be on the safe side. “Then what’s with the walking dead guy trying to take a bite out of us?”

“Good question.” Dean stands up again and stares down at the remains of their attacker. “Witches in town, maybe, getting their kicks by reanimating dead dudes. Or a stray demon trying out a new way of riding humans. Maybe the Umbrella Cooperation misplaced their T-virus. Could be anything.”

“Yeah.” Sam bags the last of the body parts and rises to stand next to Dean. “I guess we’ll be researching tomorrow then.” Dean shifts his weight from foot to foot in what Sam instantly recognizes as his ‘uncomfortable’ stance. “What?”

“We don’t have to research,” Dean mutters. “In fact, someone’s probably heard the commotion and the gunshots. I’m surprised we haven’t heard sirens yet. We should just get out of here.”

“And what, just abandon Decomposition Dan here on the floor of our motel room?”

“No, obviously we’re going to shove him in the dumpster out back.” Dean shifts again, not meeting Sam’s eyes. “But then we should just… take off.”

“And what about the witches? Or the demons or whatever is behind this?” 

“Look, Sammy, this might just be an isolated incident. And, anyway, if it’s not, there are other hunters out there.”

“So we walk away from a job.” Sam crosses his arms, staring at his brother and willing him to meet his gaze. “Since when is that something we do? People’s lives could be at stake here, since we do we turn our backs on that?”

“Since you got locked in a cage with the Devil and I spent a year trying to get you out,” Dean snaps, and he’s meeting Sam’s gaze now, he’s fucking _glaring._ “You saved the goddamn world, Sam. We don’t owe it a thing anymore, okay?”

“Dean, it’s not about _owing_ anything, it’s—”

“No, shut up, Sam.” Dean’s eyes are getting wild, and Sam doesn’t know if he wants to take a step forward and drink down the light blazing in them, or else make a run for the door. “We have lost everything. Mom, Dad, Jess, Ellen, Jo, even Bobby and Cas would be dead by now if Heaven hadn’t been feeling so generous after you ganked Satan. So there’s you, and there’s me, and I’m done fucking with that, alright?”

“Alright,” Sam agrees immediately. He’d probably agree to cutting off his own arm with Dean looking at him like that. “So let’s move this guy and then… get out of here.”

“Fine.” Dean moves and it’s like all the air in the room snaps back into place. Sam flinches at the change, his headache giving a dull throb of protest that makes him put a hand to his temple. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that either,” Dean growls as he shoves his hands under one side of the plastic-covered corpse and lifts. “Grab his feet.”

Sam does as he’s told, deciding to ignore Dean’s final comment for now. They get the body and all its parts safely stashed in the dumpster behind the motel, then leave their keys on the table and close the door behind them. As they do, Sam takes a final look at the room, the shattered window, the ruined carpet, the bullet-riddled fleur-de-lis wallpaper. They didn’t even get to sleep here.

Sam doesn’t ask to drive, and Dean doesn’t offer to let him. He stomps his foot on the gas and sends them flying down the highway, just another bullet shot from his gun, fatally precise. They stay silent for a long time until Sam, awake and itchy-eyed in the passenger seat, starts jiggling his leg with agitation and says, “We should have taken a shower before we left. It takes forever to get rid of this smell.”

“Dude, if you make my car smell like corpse, you’re washing every inch of her. Twice.”

“Excuse me, I’m not the only one who was playing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots with the zombie. You smell like death even more than I do.”

“I smell amazing,” Dean declares, and in a move that regresses them both about fifteen years, shoves his armpit at Sam’s face. Sam yelps and pushes him away, digging his fingers into the ticklish spots of Dean’s ribs and making him squirm in his seat. When they’ve both retreated to their respective sides of the car— after Sam draws an impressively high-pitched and frantically stifled giggle from Dean, and Dean charley horses him in retaliation— the silence that falls is comfortable and relaxed.

“You don’t think we’re going to turn into zombies, do you?” Dean asks after a few miles.

“Um, what?” Sam cocks his head, trying to follow this latest train of thought. Dean has a habit of building his own tracks and then running down them so fast he derails.

“Well you know, that thing grabbed us, and we both got cut. Usually that’s all it takes in the movies, a little mixing of body fluids and BAM! Zombie.”

“Gross, dude.”

“I’m just saying, maybe we need a plan. If there was some fluid mixing going on—”

“No, you need to stop saying. Particularly stop saying the words “fluid” and “mixing” in the same sentence. We are not going to turn into zombies.”

“It’d be kinda cool, though, if we did.” Dean throws Sam one of his brightest, most beautiful grins, the kind that make men and women the world over stop in their tracks, old ladies offer to bake him mountains of cookies, traffic cops let him off with just a warning. It makes Sam’s throat close up and his skin feel too tight with disbelief that after everything he’s been and done, he stills gets to see that smile.

“—and we’ll invest in some formaldehyde, and be zombie brother monster hunters,” Dean is saying. “They’d probably give us our own show on the Travel channel.”

Even though what they’re discussing is potentially a very real threat, Dean’s playful, giddy side is almost unfailingly infectious, and Sam can’t resist giving in to it. He knows Dean’s doing it on purpose, some weird misguided attempt at making up for being attacked even though there was absolutely no way it could have been his fault. But in a way that makes it almost more important for Sam to play along. So he rolls his eyes and says with just enough of a laugh, “Or some other hunter would find us and chop our heads off.”

“Nah, we’d be national treasures. We’d be like the Kardashians.” Dean glances over at Sam, the smile still going full-force. “You’re going to need to get a boob job.”

Sam finds himself grinning now too, even though his heart breaks a little bit with how much he wants to pause this moment and stay in it forever. “Okay, first, what the hell is a Kardashian? And second, if I’m getting a boob job, then you’re getting ass implants.”

“What the fuck are _ass implants_?”

The conversation carries them across a state line and a major river before being lost to the force of their yawns.

“Can sleep if y’wanna,” Dean mumbles as they fall in line behind a semi-truck.

“I’m good,” Sam tries to answer, but his gigantic yawn spoils it and makes him sound like a petulant three-year old avoiding nap time.

“Yeah, right.” Dean swerves around the semi and takes them down the first side road he finds. There’s a massive cornfield to their left, lit blue in the moonlight. Dean nearly drives the Impala into it as he parks on the gravel shoulder.

“This is becoming a habit,” Sam says as Dean kills the engine and they sit there in the dark, corn stalks swaying gently in a silent dance.

“Sorry.” Dean sounds genuinely remorseful. “Just give me half an hour then I promise I will find us a zombie-free motel.”

“I didn’t say I minded.” Sam’s already stretching out, tilting his head back and letting the Impala’s seat wrap around him like when he was younger and he’d steal Dean’s leather jacket.

“Hey!” Dean squawks when he realizes Sam is almost asleep. “Get in the back, Sasquatch. We can’t both fit up here.”

Sam mutters what he hopes amounts to something close to “fuck you” before settling in further, his upper body sliding into the seat at just the right angle to put his head in contact with Dean’s shoulder.

Dean huffs. “Fine, you seven-hundred pound jackass. But next time buy me dinner first.”

He kicks his feet into Sam’s side of the car, making sure to aim for both of Sam’s shins. It only gives Sam an excuse to move closer, settling himself more firmly against Dean’s chest. Dean grumbles something about long hair and drool, and then they’re both asleep within minutes.

There’s no reason Dean couldn’t have moved to the backseat, but that doesn’t occur to either of them until the next morning. They don’t bring it up.

***

Sam is on fire from his head down to his feet. His skin is crackling with it, turning black and falling off. He tries to scream, but the fire crawls into his mouth and races through his insides. His teeth are melting like molten rock. His intestines shrivel and his stomach bursts. There will be nothing left of him after this, he thinks. Just ash.

Suddenly he’s looking in a mirror, and he realizes the truth. The fire isn’t burning his body, the fire _is_ his body. He’s made of flames, every inch of him, except for his eyes, which are like two pieces of volcanic glass, polished by the flames and perfectly, flawlessly black—

Sam starts so hard he manages to hit both his funny bones as he claws his way frantically to wakefulness. Dean grunts beneath him, turning his face further into the sweatshirt he’s got bunched behind his head. The car is warm, and the smell of rotting flesh is so strong inside the enclosed space Sam gags and nearly vomits, groping blindly for the door.

He stumbles out into the cool morning air, spitting on the ground in an attempt to get the taste of death out of his mouth. The world is spinning around him, misty and blurred. The cornstalks in the field still have a bit of moonlight trapped beneath their leaves, and in the early morning haze they look like an army of ghosts, standing at attention, waiting for orders. Or a leader.

No. 

No. Sam pushes that thought from his mind. He’d been near that road before but he hadn’t gone down it, and eventually it was swallowed up like so many other things by the Apocalypse and Lucifer climbing into his skin.

But Sam feels different now.

He’s been trying to ignore it, trying to pass it off as just lingering trauma and memories from Hell, but he knows he’s been lying to himself. There’s something different inside him. He felt it when he first woke up. He felt it right before Dean beheaded that zombie and he can feel it now. If he reaches for it, he can even touch it, a seething place in the back of his mind that burns and scratches and spits and _begs_ to be unlocked, to be let out to play—

Dean finds Sam half an hour later, sitting on the hood of the Impala, his head in his hands, pressing his palms against his eyeballs until he sees fireworks explode behind the closed lids.

“Sammy.” Dean wraps calloused fingers around Sam’s wrists and gently tugs his hands away from his face. Sam looks into his face, and he can tell Dean knows there’s something seriously wrong with him. Most people find Dean difficult to judge, his true feelings hidden beneath layers of charm and sarcasm, but Sam’s been reading him like a book since he was born. He knows Dean doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but in his eyes, and when Sam meets his gaze he can see that heart breaking.

He wants to say something, anything, to make it better, but the cloying scent of rotting flesh still coats his tongue and his mind draws a blank.

He leans forward, leans into Dean. There’s something there, some flicker of assurance or damnation Sam can’t quite put his finger on. Dean’s eyes flash, one brighter than the other, and Sam thinks he can feel it too.

Dean holds onto Sam’s wrists for a second longer, then drops his hands to his sides.

“Breakfast?” he offers.

Sam nods and slides off the hood. “Breakfast.”

They find a small, comfortably worn diner not too far down the interstate with gingham tablecloths and framed black and white movie stills from the 40s on the wall. 

Dean orders half the food on the menu, saying things like “They don’t have extra thick french toast in Hell” and “Now I know you’re missing fresh fruit, huh, Sammy?” Sam isn’t the slightest bit hungry but he knows he’ll end up eating a little bit of everything just to keep that worried edge in Dean’s voice from getting any worse.

While they’re waiting for their food, Sam calls Bobby.

“Sam?” He sounds surprised and a little wary when he answers. Sam glances at Dean who is blowing across his cup of coffee.

“Yeah, hey, Bobby. Uh, just thought we’d give you a heads up— we got attacked by um… a zombie last night.”

“The Romero kind,” Dean adds.

“The Romero kind,” Sam dutifully repeats.

“Where are you?” Bobby asks.

“It was at a motel off forty-one in Mercer, North Dakota. We didn’t stick around ‘cause it got kinda messy and we’re… we’re not taking cases. At the moment.” Dean cuts him a look over the table but Sam ignores it. “But this thing, Bobby, it was resistant to bullets and silver and rocksalt. Dean ended up killing it by cutting its head off.”

“Dean? Is he there right now?”

“Yeah, he’s sitting across from me, drawing lewd pictures on the diner napkins.” Sam reaches across the table and smacks Dean on the arm. “Quit it.”

“Can I talk to Dean, Sam?” Bobby’s voice has gone tense and urgent, and Sam sighs. He was starting to wonder how much Bobby knew about what Dean did to get Sam out of Hell, and this only confirmed it was more than either of them felt like sharing with Sam.

“Does he want to talk to me?” Dean asks, correctly interpreting Sam’s sigh. Sam waves a hand at him but Dean makes a lunge for the phone and manages to wrest it away from Sam’s grip. Sam kicks him under the table just as the waitress arrives with their food. She gives Sam a strange look, and he realizes just how much of a mess he must look. He hasn’t showered or changed clothes in two days, he’s slept two nights in a car, been strangled by a rotting corpse, and picked up zombie guts from a motel room floor. This poor waitress probably thinks he’s some homeless junkie whose crazy brother ordered three different kinds of pancakes. Sam does his best to smile at her in what he hopes is a reasonable, normal sort of way, but Dean chooses that moment to poke him in the knee cap with a fork and the smile comes out as more a grimace.

Dean hangs up the phone as the waitress turns and hurries to her next table.

“Totally out of your league,” Dean says, his mouth already full of sausages.

Sam chooses not to dignify that with a response. “What did Bobby say?”

“He’s looking into it.”

“Anything else?”

“Nope. Hand me the ketchup.”

“Dean…” Sam hands over the bottle, trying to catch his brother’s eye. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Dean hastily shoves more food into his mouth as if he thinks if he makes his words incomprehensible enough, Sam will have to believe them. “Nuffin’.”

“Dean, come on. Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot.”

“You _are_ an idiot.” The response is automatic, born from a lifetime of using insults and jokes to deflect far more serious topics. Dean winces as soon as he says it, but Sam’s had just as much training in learning to pick his battles, so he ignores it in favor of fixing Dean with his best I-know-you’re-lying-I’m-your-brother look. Dean rolls his eyes at him and determinedly returns to his food.

“It’s got nothing to do with you, Sammy.”

“Oh, sure, it just has to do with Hell, where I happened to have spent the last hundred or so years trapped in a cage with Lucifer. Or did you forget that part?”

“Jesus, Sam!” Dean drops his hands to the table hard enough to make their dishes rattle. The diner goes quiet, heads turning in their direction. Dean leans toward Sam, lowering his voice to a hiss. “Can we not do this here? Please?”

“Fine.” Sam leans in too, partially to keep this conversation between the two of them— their waitress is standing by the counter, staring wide-eyed— and partially so Dean has no choice but to look him straight in the face. “But we are doing this. You don’t get to keep things from me. Not now. Not about this.”

Dean glares at him, and for a moment Sam wonders if they’re going to be stuck like this forever. An unstoppable force and an immovable object. Dean has always tried to protect Sam from all the bad things in the world, even when Sam’s pretty sure he’s one of them.

Then Dean gives a jerky nod and sits back, picking up his fork. The volume in the diner gradually rises and their waitress vanishes into the kitchen. Sam pulls a random plate of food forward and takes a bite. It’s his concession to Dean, to counteract winning the argument. Dean scowls like he knows exactly what Sam is trying to do, but he doesn’t stay mad for long.

“Try some of the wheat ones,” he suggests, face relaxing with each bite Sam takes. “They’re your favorite.”

Sam picks up the plate and has just enough time to register that Dean has used maple syrup to draw a huge grinning face surrounded by a nest of squiggles which is probably supposed to represent Sam— his hair looks nothing like that, thank you very much— before the window to their right shatters and he drops the plate, sending syrup and pancakes everywhere.

The diner erupts into chaos, chairs scraping, people babbling, several starting to scream. Sam and Dean leap to their feet, staring through the now glass-free window.

“No fucking way,” Dean breathes as a hand that’s missing a great deal of skin comes over the broken glass and lands in a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Sam catches movement in the parking lot out of the corner of his eye.

“There’re two of them, Dean! Go!”

Dean shoves more dishes to the floor then scrambles up on the table and launches himself out the window, tackling the zombie away from the diner and using it to break his fall. Sam dashes into the kitchen, ignoring the screams of the wait staff, and grabs a butcher’s knife from a rack before following Dean. The zombie he tackled is flailing on its back like an overturned turtle, spine undoubtedly broken, so Sam tosses Dean the small knife from the holster around his ankle and heads at a dead run towards the other zombie shuffling its way through the parked cars.

As soon as it sees Sam the zombie starts sprinting too, a horrible limping gait that’s freakishly fast. Sam barely has time to lift the butcher’s knife before he’s being thrown against the side of a Honda. The blow to his head and the sudden blaring of a car horn leave him reeling in confusion for a moment and the zombie presses its advantage. Scratching and snarling, it practically drops itself into Sam’s lap.

Its arms are unexpectedly strong, clamping around Sam so tightly he can feel bruises forming immediately. Its mouth descends towards Sam’s face, breath humid and rancid. Up this close, Sam can see it only has one eye.

He has no idea what it’s trying to do to him, bite him or eat him or hell, kiss him, but his adrenaline surges from the sheer repulsiveness of it all and he manages to thrash and buck and send the zombie tumbling to the pavement.

He scrambles for the butcher’s knife as the zombie recovers rapidly, shoving itself up with one hand twisted completely the wrong way round. Sam’s head pulses without warning, harsh and hot, but he ignores it as best he can and rolls to the side, slashing the zombie’s Achilles tendons with the knife as he goes. It flops forward like a rag doll, face smashing into the Honda, bone and teeth ripping through skin. Sam doesn’t hesitate, just stands and swings the knife with all his strength. It takes him several blows, then the zombie’s head is rolling away beneath the car.

Sam straightens with a grimace, sore and nauseous and wondering what the _hell_ is keeping Dean, when suddenly the car alarm switches off and ferocious, screaming pain rips through Sam’s entire body. He stumbles and goes down on one knee, wondering wildly if he’s been shot or stabbed.

In the silence rushing around him, Sam can just make out the sound of someone yelling. At first he thinks it might be his own organs, protesting the excruciating torture they’re currently experiencing, but then through the haze of pain he recognizes Dean’s voice.

If anything could get Sam to his feet at this moment, it’s the sound of Dean in trouble. He gropes for a handhold, finds a side mirror, and pulls himself upright. Following the curves of the car with two fumbling hands, Sam gets himself pointed in Dean’s direction. And that’s when he sees it.

It’s shaped almost like a normal human being, a head and torso and all the appropriate appendages, but its age and gender impossible to determine because it’s made of something Sam has never seen before. At first he thinks it’s smoke, then shadows, then a thousand tiny insects all clicking their pincers and flashing their wings. Within the roiling black mess are two eyes, appearing and disappearing, burning bright and deadly like the hearts of two stars.

This new creature doesn’t appear to be doing anything more than standing in front of the broken window of the diner, but Dean is on his knees in front of it, back twisting violently as he claws at his chest and screams Sam’s name.

Sam starts running again, heedless of the tremors of pain still slamming through his body. He’s got no plan, no idea what this thing is or how to kill it, but if all he manages to do is distract it from killing Dean, then that’s enough. Sam’s here on borrowed time anyway. Hell is probably waiting to welcome him back with open arms.

He gets level with Dean and yells, something inarticulate and desperate. The creature turns to him slowly, releasing Dean who drops to all fours, gasping and heaving.

 _He’s breathing_ , Sam thinks. _That’s good_. Then the creature’s blazing eyes meet Sam’s and he has enough time to think _Shit_ before the world vanishes around him.

All that’s left is the dark corner in his mind, the one full of voices and little shocks of black electricity. Sam retches, vaguely aware every muscle in his body has gone rigid.

 _Open me,_ a chorus of voices without mouths or tongues begs. _Let me out and see what I can do._

Sam is choking, his throat tearing from not being able to scream. The creature in front of him seems to pause, almost as if it’s waiting for something, something like orders, or a—

 _OPEN ME,_ the voices shriek. Sam seizes, tasting blood and bile. He can hardly feel his body anymore and it’s like being back in Hell again. He’s a mess of pain and fear and anger, and there are monsters inside trying to shape him into everything he doesn’t want to be. The voices in his head are hissing threats and promises, chewing at his brain and ready to consume the rest of him.

But Sam hasn’t lost yet. He can still hear his brother yelling, and that’s enough to force his way past the voices and back to a tiny part of himself. He manages to raise the hand now locked around the butcher’s knife. The voices writhe, surging through him, and Sam brings the blade slashing across his thigh.

This new pain blossoms bright and clean through his mind, and Sam shoves it at the dark hole inside of him. The voices howl with their own torment, recoiling like centipedes from the sun. The contradiction of it all is too much. Sam has about two seconds before he passes out or dies or quite possibly explodes into a hundred million pieces, but he clings to agonizing consciousness just a little bit longer to see the shadow creature burn up like a piece of paper and blow away.

Then Sam is falling and falling and there’s no bottom. Distantly he hears someone coughing and moaning, “Not again.”

 _Dean’s breathing_ is Sam’s last thought. _That’s good._


	3. Chapter 3

When Sam wakes up, it’s dark, and no one is screaming.

That seems wrong to him, but he can’t quite figure out why. There should be screams. He remembers hearing them, or possibly making them, before he woke up here. Wherever here is.

Gradually, Sam realizes he’s lying down on something relatively soft. His eyes are closed— or possibly removed, he remembers something about missing eyes, blank sockets like black holes— and all his bones are broken. No, maybe not broken. Maybe they’ve been removed too, and replaced with butane, then someone shoved matches under his skin and watched him go up in a chemical fire. His edges still feel like they might be burning, little licks of flame in blue or green.

His face feels cooler than the rest of him and that’s when he realizes someone is touching him. Someone with frigid, clammy hands. The smell of death and decay is suddenly overpowering, and Sam thinks _zombie._ He remembers there was definitely a corpse involved.

He flails wildly, dislodging the hands, filling the too silent air with his own half-strangled yells. His eyes must not have been removed because they fly open now, and he takes in the sight of a water-stained ceiling and a single, milky eye. He yells again, tries to get his lighter fluid bones to work, then someone is saying “Sam. Sam.” He realizes it’s not one eye he’s seeing, it’s two. And they’re not white, they’re green, and full of everything Sam has ever wanted in his life.

“Sam,” says Dean. “It’s just me.”

“Dean,” says Sam. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

In a tightly coordinated series of movements perfected over dozens of stomach flus, concussions and hangovers, Dean gets Sam upright and leaning over a trashcan just in time for him to vomit up what feels like every meal he’s ever eaten, mixed in with a heavy dose of battery acid. Dean uses one hand to hold back the top part of Sam’s hair and the other to rub soothing circles up and down his spine.

Sam throws up until he’s got nothing left but bile, tinged pink with blood he’s pretty sure is coming from his throat or the back of his mouth. Even then his body keeps retching like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. Sam feels ridiculous, helpless tears start to slide down his cheeks. They don’t stop even when his stomach resorts to painful cramping and Dean takes the trashcan away, easing Sam back down on the bed.

“Sam,” Dean says again. He’s gone back to touching Sam’s face with his fingertips as if to reassure himself that Sam is actually there, still in one piece.

 _I’m not in one piece though,_ Sam thinks as he closes his eyes again, a few more tears leaking out. _You should see what it looks like in here. Fucking Jenga. The tower’s built but there’re holes all over. Pretty soon the wrong piece is going to be pulled and then the whole thing is coming down._

Sam finds the dark, writhing pit in his mind. It’s hot and swollen like a bruise, and when he prods it the pain is enough to have him arching off the bed, head pushed back and neck straining. It’s several long moments before he sinks back into himself, limp and exhausted, and feels Dean’s hand clutched tightly on his shoulder.

“What happened?” Sam mumbles once he relocates his tongue. Dean snorts, but rubs his thumb gently back and forth across Sam’s collarbone.

“You want to tell me? Cause one minute I’m fighting a zombie, then the next minute a fucking… Balrog is trying to rip my lungs out, then you’re stabbing yourself in the leg and going into cardiac arrest.”

Even with his eyes shut, Sam can _hear_ the fury stamped on Dean’s face. “Sorry.”

“Damn right you’re sorry! What the fuck were you thinking?” Dean’s hand spasms a little on Sam’s shoulder and his voice drops from anger to confession. “You scared the shit outta me, man. I thought— fuck, Sammy, I thought you—”

Sam puts his hand over Dean’s and struggles to sit up. His stomach lurches, but he swallows tightly and forces himself to speak instead.

“I’m going to take a shower.” Dean looks at him and Sam swallows again when he sees Dean’s eyes are wet. “It’s this smell, it’s everywhere, like corpses—”

“Okay, okay. Shower. Do you need help?”

Sam doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to when he pushes himself to his feet and it becomes abundantly clear he can hardly stand on his own. Dean wedges himself under Sam’s shoulder and helps him make his embarrassingly slow way across the motel room. This one doesn’t have fleur-de-lis on the wall, Sam notes through waves of dizziness and a headache that radiates all the way down his neck and into his chest. There’s nothing on the walls but a single painting in a handmade frame, two ducks floating on a pond. 

“Holden would like that,” Dean says as they shuffle past the painting and he notices Sam staring at it, though that quickly changes to staring at Dean. Dean shrugs. “Holden Caulfield. You know, _Catcher in the Rye_.”

“Right.” That had been one of Dean’s favorite books growing up. Sam remembers he used to keep a dog-eared copy in the glove compartment of the Impala. He wonders if it’s still there.

When they reach the bathroom Dean sits Sam on the toilet then strips them both down to their boxers. It’s only then that it occurs to Sam he’s wearing sweatpants when before he was wearing jeans. There’s a sharp twinge of pain when Dean pulls the sweatpants off his legs, and Sam looks down to find several inches of stitches curving from the front of his thigh around to the side, perfectly neat and utterly incriminating.

“You sliced yourself real good, dumbass,” Dean says when he notices Sam running his index fingers over the little black lines. He’s clearly freaking out, and wants to demand to know why Sam did that and probably make him swear a blood oath to never so much as look at a knife again, but he impressively holds himself in check and turns the shower on.

“Come on, Princess.” He drags Sam back to his feet, and helps him step over the edge of the tub. “You’re washing your own junk, okay?”

Sam tries to make a witty retort, but the feeling of the hot water hitting his aching muscles feels so good he just groans instead. He leans forward to duck his head, ends up over-balancing and slips on the slick surface of the tub. Dean stops him from falling just in time with a grunt and several extremely colorful curses.

“Guess I should’ve run a bath instead,” Dean mutters, shoving at Sam until he’s propped up against the wall in a more or less steady position. “If you’re going to have the coordination of a five-year I might as well treat you like one.”

“Only if you’d still make the shampoo a submarine.” Sam can tell Dean’s gruff words are just a cover-up for his far more serious concern. He tries to look a little less pathetic, and makes a grab for the soap. Dean slaps his hand away, picking up the bar himself and working up a lather he then starts to rub on Sam’s shoulders and chest. Combined with the water, the gentle pressure of his hands feels almost like a massage. Sam tilts his head back and closes his eyes, stifling another groan.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Dean warns as he crouches to wash Sam’s legs, kneading at the tensed muscles and taking extra care around the stitches. “Drowning in the shower would be about the lamest way ever to die.”

“You can’t drown in the shower.” Sam tries not to twitch as Dean washes each of his feet, deliberately aiming for some of his most ticklish spots. “But you might get your head kicked in in the shower if you keep doing that.”

Dean chuckles warmly and stands, starting in on Sam’s arms. “You can too drown,” he insists. His hands come back to Sam’s shoulders and Sam slides a few inches down the wall to make the reach easier. “I saw it on TV.”

“Oh, okay, then.” Sam peels his upper body away from the wall, encouraging Dean to work the soap across the nape of his neck and down his back. “If you saw it on TV then it must be true.”

Dean pokes him in the side, then grabs the shampoo and rumbles, “Lean forward.” Sam doesn’t hesitate, closing the remaining few inches between them and letting his forehead come to rest just above Dean’s collarbone. He loops his arms around Dean’s waist for balance. Dean sticks sudsy fingers in his hair. Sam breathes out, every last inch of tension melting from his body.

He’s vaguely aware this should be weird, hugging his brother while they’re both nearly naked and sharing a shower, but after everything else that’s happened in his life, this barely registers as unnatural. Together they’ve lost a mother, a father, lovers, friends and any chance at a life free of constant pain and sacrifice. But despite everything they haven’t lost each other, and this is the happiest Sam has felt since he came back from Hell. He feels safe here under the water with Dean’s hands on his head and Dean’s body wrapped securely in his arms. There are no monsters in here. No secrets. No death or heartbreak. There’s just Sam and Dean, holding on to the only thing they’ve ever been given to keep, and the only thing they have left.

By the time Dean rinses all the shampoo from Sam’s hair and shuts off the water, Sam is so relaxed he’s almost asleep. Dean plunks him on the toilet again to make a half-assed attempt at drying him off, then gives up and drags Sam to the nearest bed, yanks off the covers and lets him collapse into it. He piles the covers back on top of him, then Sam’s pretty sure he adds the covers from the other bed as well.

“Just promise me you’ll wake up, Sammy,” Dean whispers, so quietly Sam almost doesn’t hear him. After a moment’s hesitation, Dean lies down next to him on the bed and presses two tentative fingers to the pulse in Sam’s throat.

“Promise,” Sam slurs through a yawn. He uses his last remaining energy to untangle one hand from his mass of covers and fumble it around until it comes in contact with some part of Dean. He finds his chest first and pushes his palm flat, splayed fingers resting over Dean’s tattoo. “Not going to leave you. Not ever.”

The smell of death still lingers in Sam’s nose, a buzzing at the edge of his awareness like a mosquito in his ear, but the smell of soap and Dean’s skin is stronger, keeping Sam warm and safe as he slips away into the dark.

***

It’s the smell of coffee and donuts that wakes Sam for a second time, along with Dean’s voice saying loudly, “So here’s the plan.”

Sam sits up groggily, struggling under the weight of what feels like several tons of bedding. Images from his most recent nightmare still cling like cobwebs in front of his eyes. In the dream he had been driving the Impala through an unfamiliar town, searching for something while Dean lay silent and unresponsive in the seat next to him. One of Dean’s eyes was missing.

“How’re you feeling?” the very much alive Dean in front him asks.

Sam pushes away the nightmare and tries to think of an answer. He feels less like he’s dying today, more like he’s just been run over several times. By a freight train. “You got coffee?”

“Yep. That’s step one of the plan.” Dean passes a steaming cup to Sam. He looks pale and ill and Sam wonders if he got any sleep at all. “We drink the coffee. Step two— potentially interchangeable with step one— we eat these delicious donuts I was awesome enough to buy for us. Step three, you tell me what the hell was going on when you tried to sever your femoral artery and made the smoke monster from _Lost_ explode like a firecracker.”

Sam takes a swallow of his coffee. It goes down his throat like broken glass, sticking to each cut and tear. “Is there a step four?”

“Um, I kick your ass for being a reckless moron?”

“I saved your life, Dean.”

Dean snorts, opens the box of donuts and props himself up against the motel room’s rickety breakfast table. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. That thing was going to kill you, and it was only doing it to get my attention.”

“Oh, so what, you had a little mental chat with it while it was crushing my chest like a beer can? Did it tell you it was lonely, and just looking for a friend?”

“No.” The little things in the back of Sam’s mind are waking up, pincers clicking eagerly like they’re readying themselves for a big meal. He takes another drink of his coffee, hoping the pain with keep them at bay. “I just knew. That thing was from Hell. And so am I.”

“No you’re not.” Multi-colored sprinkles and bits of glaze scattered across the tabletop as Dean throws down his donut. “You’re a person, Sammy. A human being.”

“Dean, come on. That hasn’t been completely true since I was six months old.”

Dean goes livid, his expression twisting into something ugly and terrifying the way it usually only does right before he kills something. Sam swings his legs fully out of the bed and plants both feet on the floor; he needs the extra stability to keep talking when Dean looks like that.

“I was Lucifer’s vessel,” Sam tells his knees. “And I spent… time in the cage with him.” There’s a muted bang like a fist hitting a tabletop, and Sam’s suspects Dean may have visited further violence on his donut, but he doesn’t dare look up. “I don’t remember much of that time, but I do remember, even in that cage, he is their God. And I was a part of that, for a while. Now he’s down there, and I’m up here, and it’s like…”

“Like what, Sam?” Dean’s voice is soft and deadly.

Sam swallows, tastes death. “Like I brought a piece of Hell back with me.”

The creatures in his mind riot as he finally admits their existence aloud. Shrieking and spitting, they gnaw themselves little holes and start pouring through them. Sam can feel their pincers sinking into the roof of his mouth and the soft skin beneath his eyes. He clenches his hands until his nails split the skin and he feels his own blood start to pool in his palms.

“I can feel it inside of me, Dean. Like a cancer. And that creature could feel it too. It _knew_ me.”

“No!” Dean moves like he’s hunting, fast and merciless. One second he’s at the table, the next he’s kneeling on the floor in front of Sam, trying to pry open his hands and mop up the blood with the cuff of his shirt. “You’re my little brother,” he keeps repeating. “You’re my little brother, and that’s all. That’s all I let out of Hell. Just you.”

“What?” Sam pulls his hands back. The blood smears over Dean’s palms and with him kneeling on the floor it’s like some perverted kind of communion. _This is my body, this is my blood._ “Dean. What did you do?”

Dean doesn’t answer. From the rigid set of his shoulders and the way he swipes his bloodied hand over is jaw, Sam can tell he’s crying.

Sam scoots forward on the bed, bracketing Dean with his thighs. He puts his hand under Dean’s chin and tilts his face up. His eyes are closed, as though if he stays like that he can shut out the world.

Sam moves his hand to the back of Dean’s neck then leans down until their foreheads are pressed together. He closes his eyes too, but he doesn’t need to shut out the world. It’s all right here in front of him.

Dean is taking shallow breaths through his silent tears, and each passes hot and sharp over Sam’s lips.

“It’s okay,” Sam starts whispering into the spaces between each gasp. “It’s okay.”

Dean brings one hand up to fist it in the front of Sam’s shirt. They stay like that for a long time, Sam speaking Dean’s words, Dean breathing Sam’s air.

Then Dean shifts, rising up on his knees and pushing his forehead harder against Sam’s. “Sammy,” he says brokenly. “Sammy, I—”

Sam’s cell phone rings, the sound like a bomb going off in the quiet room. Sam and Dean both jump and pull apart. Sam gropes for the phone while Dean hastily scrubs at his eyes.

The caller ID reads _Bobby_. Sam sighs, but hits talk.

“Sam?”

“Hey, Bobby.”

“Where are you, Sam?”

“In a motel room. Listen, Bobby, if it’s not an emergency now’s not really the best time—”

“I heard about what happened at the diner, Sam. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah, it was us.” Sam glances at Dean to find he’s recovered himself enough to be pulling an annoyed face and holding his hand out for the phone. Sam shakes his head at him.

“Bobby, there were two zombies this time, and they were stronger. And then there was some sort of… creature thing, we had no idea—”

Bobby sounds angry and almost scared when he cuts him off. “Those weren’t _zombies_ , Sam.”

Sam shoots Dean a bewildered look. “Then what—”

Like in the diner, Dean snatches the phone right out of Sam’s hand, ignoring Sam’s “oh, come on!” and saying immediately, “Bobby. It’s Dean. Talk to me.”

Sam gets dressed and brushes his teeth while Dean’s on the phone, deliberately dropping his duffle and banging the medicine cabinet until Dean glares at him, but it doesn’t stop Dean from continuing his inscrutable monosyllabic answers and noncommittal noises. When he finally hangs up, Sam is standing with his hands on his hips, ready to do whatever it takes to get Dean to tell him what he’s been hiding.

Dean stops him before he even gets started. “I’m going to tell you what’s going on, Sammy.”

“Oh.” Sam deflates, caught off guard. “Okay. Good.”

“But I’m not telling you here.”

“Dean—”

“No, come on. I said I’d tell you, and I will. Let’s just get out of here first, okay? I’m sick of this room. Those damn ducks are looking at me weird.”

Sam barks out a laugh in spite of himself. “Alright, fine. Go check us out and I’ll meet you in the car. And yes—” Sam gets to head Dean off at the pass this time, “I can make it there just fine by myself.”

Dean makes a point of bandaging Sam’s hands before they leave, wrapping gauze around his palms with all the care of a surgeon or a master artist. Dean was never so skilled at anything as he was at fixing Sam. Several drops of blood remain on the carpet, but they pack their stuff and leave the room without making any effort to clean them up. They’re just a few more pieces of themselves left behind in the wake of their lifestyle of destruction.

Sam’s walk to the car is slow and stilted; his limbs feel twice as heavy as usual, and there’s a dull ache all along his left side from his shoulder to the small of his back, but he makes it there before Dean comes out of the main office. And because he can, he slides into the driver’s seat.

“No fucking way” is the first thing Dean says when he gets to the car, opening the driver’s side door and making the universal ‘get the hell out’ hand gesture at Sam.

“Come on, Dean.” In spite of their most recent difficulties, or maybe because of them, Sam is not above a little bit of wheedling. “I haven’t driven her since I’ve been back. I’m feeling much better now, I drank all my coffee and everything. Come on, please?”

Dean looks thunderous, which means he’s already given in. He slams the door and gets in the other side. “You go where I tell you,” he demands, because Winchesters never give in to anything without setting a few of their own conditions. “And if you feel even the slightest bit tired, or dizzy, or even like you have to fucking sneeze— you pull over.”

“Okay.” Sam holds out his hand for the keys. Dean gives him a final glare for good measure, then hands them over. The Impala roars to life under Sam’s hands and he takes her out of the parking lot and onto the highway. The first long stretch they come to, Sam drops his foot on the gas and lets the Impala take over, going far faster than he normally does when there’s no one bleeding out in the backseat. Everything is different now but this never changes, and Sam wants to feel the rumbling of the engine all the way into his bones.

Dean’s directions make it clear he has a specific destination in mind. Sam doesn’t even know for sure what state they’re in, but Dean’s always been good with knowing exactly where he is and where he wants to go.

After half an hour Dean has Sam leave the highway and take several increasingly rustic roads that lead them to the gravel banks of a river at the bottom of small gorge. Trees and scrub lines the hills on either side, and to their left a rusted steel bridge spans the water. As Sam puts the car into park, a train passes over the bridge, making it rattle and shake like a tin can hit with a round of buck shot. There’s something familiar about the sound, about the way the industrial bleakness of the bridge seems to infect the trees, making them look tired and scraggly.

“Did we come here once as kids?” Sam asks.

“Yep. You wanted to go swimming, but Dad said no because it was November and the water was freezing.”

Sam squints through the windshield, trying to remember that day. He was probably about ten at the time. “I went in anyway, didn’t I?”

“You bet you did, you little brat. We had to wrap you in almost every piece of clothing we owned and I swear you didn’t stop shivering for a week.” Dean gets out of the car. “Come on, over here.”

Sam follows Dean to a group of large rocks, piled near the edge of the water. The trees prevent most of the sunlight from reaching the river, except for this spot. The rocks are warm to the touch as Sam and Dean each choose one and sit down.

“We had a picnic here,” Sam remembers. “Or, what counted as picnic for us. I think the food came from a gas station.”

“Hey, we had sandwiches and apples and juice boxes. That’s a picnic. And Dad bought an extra loaf of bread so you could feed the ducks.”

“So _you_ could feed the ducks. You were the one that was obsessed with them.”

“Oh, right you were little pussy back then and they scared the shit out of you.”

“No that was geese, not ducks. And they didn’t _scare_ me, I just didn’t like them getting too close. They have extremely powerful beaks, you know. There’ve been many documented cases of people losing fingers to angry fowl.”

Dean laughs, loud and wonderful. “Yeah, sure, in Hitchcock movies.” 

He leans back on his elbows and closes his eyes, letting the sun wash over him. Sam allows himself briefly to enjoy the moment, the sound of the river lapping gently at the gravel shores, the faint hum of insects punctured by the twittering of a bird, and the sight of Dean, laid out and at least pretending to be relaxed. The sun highlights his freckles and the dark sweep of his eyelashes, making him looks years younger. Dean could almost be a teenager again, happy just to take orders from his father, pull his stupid little brother from a freezing river, and throw some bread at some ducks.

But despite the tranquil setting Sam’s mind is dark and teeming with things that skitter across the inside of his skull and lick around his eardrums and make themselves impossible for him to ignore.

“Dean,” he says quietly, as though he can avoid breaking the peacefulness if he makes his voice soft enough. “How did you get me out of Hell?”

Dean doesn’t open his eyes. “I broke it.”

“You broke— what?”

“Hell. I broke Hell. Cracked it open like an egg.”

Sam stares at him. He thinks of all the lore he read while Dean was serving his time in the Pit, tries to come up with something to help Dean’s words make the slightest bit of sense. He draws a blank. “Dean, I don’t understand—”

Dean straightens up and twists around, looking at Sam at last though his expression is unreadable. “You remember when the Yellow-Eyed Demon opened that gateway to Hell? It was sort of like that. Only, we didn’t have a gateway. We made a fault line.” Dean pulls a passable imitation of his usual smirk. “The Sam Andreas.”

Sam tries to wrap his head around that. “But the amount of power that would take…”

“Well, Hell was a bit of mess at the time. You see, they thought they were getting their Rapture, but what they ended up with was just some floppy-haired, overgrown kid locking their leader in a cage. Kind of knocked their defenses down for a while.”

“And it was just that easy then? To make a crack in Hell?”

Dean shrugs. “Cas helped. And some of his friends. He managed to stop Heaven tearing itself down long enough to convince them they owed you one for taking down the Devil.”

“Well I did let him out in the first place,” Sam mutters. That’s always going to be a sore point, but Dean frowns at him so Sam moves past it. “But okay, so you managed to crack Hell. Still doesn’t explain how you got me out of the cage.”

“That was the tricky part,” Dean says casually, as though everything he’s been describing up until now was as easy as salting and burning some bones. “We had to get the placement just right so we could get inside the cage. And then Bobby came up with this ancient Norse summoning ritual thing, like you were the ship and I was the anchor, blah blah blah, we chanted, we drew some runes, we burned a lot of weird smelling plants. There was some blood stuff and then there you were.”

Dean’s tone is deliberately light but Sam knows from his own attempts at breaching Hell just how difficult it must have been. The words ‘blood stuff’ remind Sam of seeing Dean in the shower, and how his arms bore several vicious and unfamiliar scars. He’s sure there’s a lot more Dean isn’t telling him, sacrifices and rites preformed, deals made, but those aren’t important right now.

“I wasn’t the only thing that got out though, was I?” Sam asks.

Dean turns back to face the river. The sun has moved in the sky now, and its new position puts Dean’s face in shadow. “No.”

“The zombies and that other thing, they came through the crack.”

“Yes. Well, technically just the other things came through. Bobby thinks they make the zombies. You know, as like—”

“Foot soldiers.” Sam takes a deep breath, then sits up straight and links his fingers, elbows resting on his knees. His planning stance. “Okay, is the crack closed now?”

“Yeah.” Dean seems a little wary of Sam’s sudden shift in mood. “We rigged it so it closed the second you came through.”

“Good. So there’s a finite number of these things in the world then, unless they can somehow breed which a little too gross to think about, so I say we assume there’s only so many.”

“Sammy…”

“We’re going to need to do some research. Figure out what the signs are when one of these things is around. Probably put out an alert to the other hunters, and call Cas, see if he has any advice on how to kill them, otherwise I’ll just have to—”

“Sammy, stop.” Dean stands up and turns around. With Sam still sitting on a rock, Dean towers over him, blocking out the sun. “We’re not hunting these things.”

“What? Dean, I know you said you don’t want to take any more cases right now, but these creatures followed me out of Hell, and they’re still following me. I’m not just going to sit by and let them run around killing innocent people.”

“No, we’re not sitting by. We’re running.”

“Dean—”

“Sam, we went up against _one_ of these things, and I ended up giving you CPR in a parking lot.” Dean’s voice has gone steely and sharp like a blade. “I did not bring you back from Hell to watch you die.”

Sam flinches, but has to add, “They’re going to come after me, anyway, Dean. We’ve got to be prepared.”

“I don’t want to be prepared.” Dean’s hands close into fists and he sets his jaw. “This was supposed to be over. You went to Hell, you stopped the Apocalypse. That was supposed to be the goddamn end of all this!”

“Look, Dean…” Sam stands and reaches for him but Dean puts his hands on Sam’s chest and shoves, sending him stumbling backwards several steps.

“Who decides?” he snarls. “Who decides this is our fault? This is our job? Why do we have to spend our whole damn lives sacrificing everything we have for everyone else?”

“I can’t run away from my mistakes, Dean. And neither can you. That’s not how we were raised.”

“Fuck that!” Dean yells. He’s so angry now he’s gone pale, his freckles standing out like tiny bullet holes all over his skin. “We were raised to believe we could make a difference in this world, but every time we try we end up getting our asses handed to us, along with a couple corpses of the people we love. There ain’t an end to this war, Sam. I’m not letting you become just another body killed for the cause.”

“And what about you?” Sam demands, closing the distance between him and Dean so he’s the one towering now. “What happens when these creatures come after us and we’re not ready for them, and they kill you to get me? What do I do then? This thing between us goes both ways, you know.”

“Then you should understand why I want to run!”

“You should understand why I want to fight!”

“I can’t watch you die again!”

“Fine, then how about you do yourself the courtesy of getting murdered first and I’ll just follow after. Seems a waste of a lot hard work getting me out of Hell though, if you want me to just jump right back in!”

Dean makes a sharp movement, and for a second Sam’s sure he’s about to get punched, but then Dean’s hand is gripping his hair and Dean is pressing up against his chest and Dean is kissing Sam like it’s the end of the world.

And maybe it is. The Apocalypse was just a warm up compared to this— Dean’s lips strong and sure again Sam’s, his arm around Sam’s back, the heavy beat of his heart that feels like it’s beneath Sam’s own ribs. This is the kind of thing that makes mountains crack, oceans boil and the sky burn.

Sam kisses Dean back.

Sam has a piece of Hell in his mind and a Devil-shaped scar beneath his skin and the armies of evil on a never-ending march for his soul, so he kisses his brother on the banks of a river where in another lifetime he once went swimming, and Dean fed the ducks.

Dean is gentle despite his anger, kissing soft and slow, but Sam is not. He bites his way into Dean’s mouth, marks his lips and claims his tongue. He wraps his arms around Dean and pulls him in so tightly even with layers of clothes between them it feels like they’re touching skin to skin. _This is my body, this is my blood._

This kiss for centuries, for every day Sam was in Hell and every second Dean spent trying to get him back. It’s like they’re trying to climb inside each other, to destroy any once of space between them, and Sam is more than okay with that. They were never really meant to be two people, anyway. A heart can’t beat when half of it is missing.

“I’m not leaving you,” is the first thing Sam says when they pull apart. He says the words into Dean’s jaw, his ear, the curve of his throat. He’d tattoo them there this second if he could, put a promise in black ink and make the universe aware he was going to keep it forever. “I’m not leaving you. Not ever.”

Dean doesn’t say anything so Sam kisses him again. They’re both shaking, exhausted and terrified and sick of the world trying to take away everything they own. Dean’s tongue slides again Sam’s; Sam angles his head to let him even deeper and swallows down Dean’s following moan. Hell can’t touch them when they’re like this. Not when they’re united, together, giving each other everything they have.

Dean pulls away first. He shoots Sam a fragile, guilty look then turns to face the river. Sam thinks he should feel more confused than he does, but he made his promise not to leave Dean and everything else is just details. He gives Dean a few minutes, then steps up beside him and gently knocks his shoulder. Dean turns to look at him, and Sam smiles.

They don’t talk about the kiss. They strip down to their boxers instead and go swimming in the river. It’s cold but not freezing and they stay in until the sun starts to go down, having handstand contests, splashing fights, and trying to rub mud in each other’s hair. They return to the rocks to dry off and soak up the last rusting rays of the sunset.

Sam is stumbling and fuzzyheaded by now, tired and still feeling the effects of his fight with the shadow creature. His back and shoulders ache like he’s carrying some immense weight on them. The corners of Dean’s eyes tighten with anxiety, and he lets Sam lean back against his chest while he runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, pulling out stray bits of plants and working through the worst of the tangles. The things in Sam’s head are mostly quiet, quelled by Dean’s gentle ministrations. If a shadow creature were to come out of the river right this moment, Sam thinks he could destroy it with barely a blink.

“I know we don’t believe in fate or destiny or all that crap, but I sometimes I feel like I’m meant for this,” he tells Dean sleepily.

“Meant for what?”

“Killing things.”

Dean’s hands go still, and Sam can feel the muscles in his chest and stomach start to clench. “Sam—”

“No, I just mean, some people paint. Some people do math. I kill evil.” The next part is said only half-jokingly. “I save the world.”

They’re too comfortable and too worn out for Dean to get angry now, Sam knows, but when he speaks his voice is quietly and completely wrecked. “What do I do then?”

The light from the sunset reflects off the remaining water droplets on Sam’s skin, making them look like blood. “You save me.”

Sam twists until he can get his ear pressed to Dean’s bare chest. Dean pulls his fingers from Sam’s hair and lets them rest on his shoulders instead. The sun sets over the river, and Sam dozes off, listening to the steady beating of Dean’s heart that sounds just like his own.


	4. Chapter 4

The zombies come out of the river just as Sam and Dean are getting dressed and packing up the car. There are three of them this time, and they’re in the worst shape of any they’ve seen so far. One is missing most of the skin and muscle on the right side of its body, a few stringy tendons left clinging to muddy bones. Another one has a sizable chunk gone from its skull, brain visible and glistening like the inside of a clamshell.

All three of them are missing an eye.

“Oh come on,” Dean groans as the first undead shambles its way onto the gravel shore, its abdomen open and its intestines tangling around its knees. “We just went swimming in there. That’s so gross.” He opens the trunk of the Impala and digs around until he finds their scimitar. “What do you say, Sammy, I’ll be Athos, you be Porthos?”

“Okay, except we only have one sw— ah!” Sam doubles over as his head suddenly feels like its being ripped in two. The creatures in his mind launch into a frenzy, throwing themselves against the crack, trying to force their way through. “Dean, there’s a creature,” Sam manages to get out past the thousands of wings clogging his throat. “You take the zombies, I’ll—”

“Sam!” Dean yells, but then one of the zombies gets close enough to make a grab for him and he gets distracted, swinging the scimitar so fast it whistles through the air. 

Sam turns to face the creature where it stands in the shadow of the steel bridge. With the sun set and the area surrounding the river bereft of lights, the creature is almost invisible, except for its eyes which glow like bullet casings fresh from a gun. But even if he were blind, Sam would be able to tell exactly where the creature is. It pulls on the dark piece of his mind, magnetic and undeniable. Just like it knows him, Sam knows it.

And it’s waiting for an order.

 _OPEN ME_. The voices in Sam’s head are even stronger this time, screaming with fangs out and bodies tensed for action. Sam swears he can see crooked legs out of the corners of his eyes, skittering over his skin and up into his hair. _Let me take over. Let me be your strength._

No. Sam’s strength is knee-deep in the river, stabbing a zombie in the neck with a sword. The creature starts advancing on him, and the voices become so loud Sam’s teeth rattle in his jaw. He drops to his knees, digging fingernails into his scalp until blood is trickling down his temples. The pain barely registers, and the creature gets closer. 

It won’t hurt him, Sam knows. It is still waiting for him to issue instructions, to crack open his skull and let the darkness inside flood out, turning him into the person Lucifer always wanted him to be. A person who can lead armies, command souls, tear down Heaven, and raise Hell.

The creature is waiting for him, but that doesn’t mean it’s patient.

Dean yells as he is dragged from the water and thrown onto his back on the shore. The creature doesn’t move, just flashes its iron-hot eyes at Sam, but Dean yells again and starts writhing as if his sword has been thrust through his stomach and is pinning him to the ground.

 _I can make it stop,_ the voices hiss as sticky feelers with sharp ends wriggle into the spaces beneath Sam’s cheekbones. _YOU can make it stop. Open me. Open me and you can have the world._

“I don’t want it,” Sam tries to say, but it comes out garbled, a series of bitten off noises and half-formed breaths. He coughs and spits, trying to clear the wings and scales from where they’re lodged in his throat. He drops his hands to the gravel under his knees, fingers spasming. The creature is close enough now to be in his line of sight even as he hunches over, chest to thighs. Dean howls until it turns into a gurgle, thick and wet. Sam can’t make himself look to see if there’s blood.

One of his wildly clenching hands closes over a rock. The voices are getting ready to spill from his eyes and nose and mouth like tar that will cover Sam’s body until he and the creature are indistinguishable. He raises the rock and brings smashing down on his other hand.

The splitting of skin and the snapping of bones is just what Sam needs. He bundles up the pain and shoves it white-hot at the things in his mind. As they wail and slither back into their holes, the creature in front of him vanishes without a sound.

Sam slumps over on his side, facing Dean.

“Fuck,” Dean is saying as he pushes himself to his hands and knees. “Fuck fuck mothingfucking fuckity fuck.”

Sam would agree, except his mouth won’t work and there’s something wet dribbling past his lips. He thinks he might have bitten through his tongue.

The moon has risen now, lighting the area in cold silver and blue, making it beautifully depressing once more. The river sparkles like diamonds under the bruise-colored bridge, but Sam’s last sight is of Dean, crawling towards him across the gravel.

 _Remember when you kissed me?_ Sam wants to ask, but he passes out instead.

***

It takes Sam two days to regain consciousness. Once he does, it’s another three hours before he can pull himself together enough to remember who he is and what he did. It only takes him half an hour to recognize Dean, but his mind is so scrambled he keeps mistaking the body seated at the edge of his bed for a corpse. It sends him into such panics attacks he has no choice but to keep his eyes closed and retreat back into the chaotic mess inside his head.

Finally Sam is able to open his eyes and see his brother sitting on the end of his bed rather than some figure with rotting skin or exposed bones. His self-awareness comes back in a flood. He knows his name is Sam Winchester, he likes apricots, the ocean, and Dostoyevsky, and he’s back to killing creatures from Hell with his mind.

And his left hand really, really hurts.

“Hey,” he croaks, wincing as his voice comes out sounding like he’s been drinking bleach. Dean practically flies off the bed, hands rising into a position that is almost defensive, for reasons Sam really doesn’t want to consider. When he just lies there, quiet and limp, Dean relaxes.

“Hey,” he says back. “You gonna puke this time?”

“I don’t think so.” Sam’s muscles feel like jelly. He doubts his stomach is currently capable of even taking in food, much less expelling it.

Dean sets aside the newspaper he has crushed in one hand and moves around to Sam’s side of the bed, pulling up his shirtsleeve as he goes so he can rest a forearm on Sam’s brow.

“You have a fever,” Dean declares as though it’s something Sam has done on purpose. “How’s your hand?”

“Sore.” Sam tries to flex it under the covers but the slightest movement sends daggers of pain all the way up to his shoulder. “What did I do to it?”

“Broke three of your fingers in two places each.” Dean is shaking Tylenol from a bottle with short, furious jerks of his arm. “I splinted them for you.”

“Thanks.” Sam takes the Tylenol and glass of water Dean all but shoves into his hand. He thinks about reminding Dean that smashing his hand was how he was able to kill the creature and save both their lives, but he has a feeling that will only make Dean more angry, not less. He tries to sit up instead, hampered by the throbbing lump of pain that currently constitutes his left hand. Dean lets him struggle for a full minute before sighing gustily and leaning in to help.

Once they get Sam propped up against the headboard Dean sits down next to him on the bed. He doesn’t take his hand away from the back of Sam’s head where he put it while he was adjusting the pillows. The pads of his fingers stick slightly in the matted strands of Sam’s hair.

“So,” Sam says.

“So,” Dean repeats.

Up this close, Sam can see how exhausted Dean looks, red-eyed and unshaven. He passes his thumb over Dean’s cheekbone where there’s a faint bruise he doesn’t remember seeing at the river.

“So what now?” Sam asks.

Dean lunges forward and Sam is ready for him, meeting his lips with an open mouth. They kiss like an argument and an apology. They kiss like they’re coming apart at the seams, their hands on each other the only things holding them together. They kiss like they’re dying, like they might already be dead.

Sam wrenches his mouth away when he can’t take it any longer, and buries his face in Dean’s neck. He can still smell the stench of the rotting zombies on Dean’s skin, making him wonder if Dean’s showered or even left Sam’s side at all since that day. But it’s okay, because even though death clings to Dean, death doesn’t have him. Sam does.

“I think we should get a house,” Dean murmurs into his hair.

“What?” Sam tries to pull back enough to see Dean’s face but Dean doesn’t let him, holding him tighter against his chest.

“I’ve thought about it while you were out,” Dean continues. He walks his hands down Sam’s back in what Sam first thinks is some sort of caress until he realizes Dean is pausing as he moves from spot to spot, waiting to see if there’s a place that elicits a wince or groan of pain. “These things are going to keep coming after us, you were right about that. And if we’re not going to run—”

“We’re not,” Sam interjects.

“—then holing up somewhere makes the most sense. We find somewhere away from any major cities or town, somewhere isolated that we can fortify.” Dean can’t help a little bit of excitement creeping into his voice. “We’ll zombie proof it!”

Sam laughs, shaking his head against the softness of Dean’s t-shirt. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. It’s a good plan.” Sam pauses, then adds a little wistfully, “We’ve never had a house before.”

Dean extricates himself carefully from Sam’s arms and pushes until Sam lies back against the pillows. “We’re going to do some research, Sammy, figure out a new way to kill these things.”

“Dean, look, they’re connected to me, this is the only way—”

“Pretty soon you’re gonna run out of body parts to break,” Dean interrupts him, face serious and tone leaving no room for argument. “Please just say you’ll help me look. Come on, geek boy. It’s research.” He gives Sam’s shoulder a light punch. “You love research.”

“Alright, fine, we’ll look.” Sam kind of wants Dean to kiss him again, but he doesn’t know if it would be weird now since the thank-god-you’re-alive-and-not-a-jibbering-mess fervor has faded. “Do you suppose there’s a website that has both zombie bunker real estate listings and advice on ganking Lucifer’s minions?”

“Oh, I uh… I already found us a house.” Dean blushes as Sam stares at him, and Sam’s desire to kiss him deepens. “You were comatose, man, and I couldn’t fucking sit still.”

“Where is it?”

“Kansas.” Dean correctly reads the tightening of Sam’s shoulders, adding, “It’s not near Lawrence. It’s not near anything, really, but it’s not near Lawrence.”

Sam nods, short and brusque, then tries a smile. “Do I want to know how we’re paying for this?”

Dean grins back at him. “Probably not.”

Sam hmms, and fuck how weird it might be, he’s still feeling a little woozy and he wants another kiss. He reaches for Dean, ready to lick the smile right off his mouth like candy, and Dean isn’t resisting, he’s letting himself be pulled down, he’s closing his eyes— and the faintest breeze passes over them, accompanied by a deep voice saying, “Sam.”

“Jesus Christ!” Sam sits up so fast he nearly knocks Dean on the floor. The nausea he wasn’t feeling swoops in all at once, and it’s only through supreme effort that he manages to avoid puking all over the angel’s shoes. “Castiel. Guess you still haven’t learned how to knock.”

Despite the awful timing Sam feels absurdly glad to see the angel, and he stands up to greet him with a smile, expecting to Cas to be looking at him with his usual vaguely perplexed expression, or maybe even a hint of happiness at seeing Sam back from the dead.

What he’s not expecting is for Castiel to be staring at him with such wrath and sorrow his vessel struggles to contain it. His eyes burning briefly white and it hits Sam like a punch, sending him stumbles backwards.

“Sam,” Castiel says, his voice a similar mixture of human and divine; even though he’s speaking softly the windows rattle and Sam’s glass of water falls off the nightstand and breaks with a dull sound against the carpet. “This is an abomination.”

“Well hello to you too,” Sam mutters weakly. He’s pretty sure with the way Cas is talking only to him the abomination he’s referring to is Sam’s new creature extermination methods, not the fact he’s now had his tongue in his brother’s mouth more than once. Cas takes a step forward and Sam takes several more backwards, hitting the solid wall of Dean’s body.

“Sam, this cannot go on.” Castiel pauses, and somewhere in his dreadful tone Sam thinks he hears a bit of regret. “I have to stop you.”

“But I’m doing the right thing here!” He glances over his shoulder at Dean, hoping for some back up, but Dean won’t meet his eyes. “This isn’t like the demon blood or anything. I came back with a piece of Hell inside of me, yeah, but I’m trying to fix that!”

“This cannot be fixed.” Cas steps forward again, and Sam’s never seen him look like this, like if angels could cry, he would be sobbing. “What you’ve become, Sam, it is… it is intolerable. We should never have brought you back.”

“Cas, I’m not evil!” This hurts, way more than when he first met Castiel and the angels all condemned him. Since then Cas has been his friend, Cas has offered him redemption when Sam never thought he deserved it, must less would be granted it by a servant of Heaven. Cas gave him back Dean. Sam would always owe him for that, and it aches now to think Cas wants him dead.

“I am sorry, Sam,” Cas says, and he sounds like he means it. “This is largely my fault. I knew the risks involved in bringing you back, but Dean did not wish to hear them.”

“Cas, I swear, I’m going to fix this.” Sam’s aware he’s begging now. He would go down on his knees and pray if he thought it would help. “I’m not going to let Hell win.”

Cas is pale, almost translucent as though he’s wishing himself away from this motel room, from what he’s about to do. “Me neither,” he whispers, and he doesn’t sound like an angel anymore, he sounds fully human and like his heart is breaking. He raises his hand towards Sam’s face. 

Dean explodes into action, pushing something wet and cold into Sam’s grip then slamming his hand down on the sigil he traced on the top of the dresser. Cas vanishes like he was never there, but Sam can’t wipe the angel’s final expression from his mind so easily. He looks down at the penknife in his hand, glistening with Dean’s blood.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. Cas looked like he wanted to cry but didn’t know how so Sam is going to do it for him right now, tears slipping hot and fast down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Dean.”

“Pack your shit,” Dean orders by way of answer. “He’s not going to stay away forever.”

“Dean, maybe he was ri—”

Dean rounds on Sam, seizes two handfuls of his shirt and throws him against the dresser hard enough to send it slamming into the wall. Sam feels Dean’s blood seep into the back of his shirt. Dean gets right up in his face, tears in his own eyes, and growls, “Pack. Up. Now.”

Sam packs. Dean goes to check them out, and they’re flying down the interstate in less than twenty minutes. They don’t speak. Sam cries all the way into Kansas.

***

Their house is a two-story farmhouse that sits on a slight hill, the only hill in what is otherwise quite possibly the flattest place on earth. The road in front of their house is packed dirt. It’s ten minutes to drive to the highway, another thirty to get into town. Across the road in a massive cornfield; on one side is a field where crops grew once that is now overgrown with weeds, on the other side it’s all grass. 

The floors inside are wood, worn and creaky with a special ability to trap the nighttime chill and refuse to let it go. There’s a living room, a kitchen, and an office on the first floor, bathroom, bedroom, and guest room on the second. There’s a basement with laundry, a furnace, and water damage. The wind howls outside almost constantly, and a great deal of it finds its way into the house, sneaking under doors and rattling past windowpanes. The paint on the walls is chipped, the furniture left by the previous owner is ancient and shabby.

Sam loves every inch of it.

The first and only time he ever came close to having a place to call his own was the apartment he shared with Jessica in that final year at Stanford, lifetimes ago. But even that had been student housing on a six-months lease, and it hadn’t felt permanent. This feels permanent. This house with its leaky kitchen faucet and sagging front steps feels permanent. No matter how long he and Dean actually end up staying here, Sam thinks this house feels like home.

His delight, however, is nothing compared to Dean’s. The first night they get there they spend several hours laying hasty protection, painting devils traps, tucking away hex bags, rubbing salt into the floorboards. Then they collapse together onto the master bed exhausted from the long drive and the giddy surreality of standing still. Sam is all set to pass out, but Dean starts talking.

He tells Sam about his plans for home improvement that range from zombie-protection to new tiles in the kitchen. He tells him what they’re going to buy in town the next day, how they’re going to rearrange the living room, what meals they should cook first. It’s a side of Dean Sam has never truly seen before, and it makes him feel briefly guilty as he thinks back to Lisa. Dean could have had all of this living with her, without the extra drawback of a brother dragging Hell around behind him.

But then Dean rolls over and pulls Sam close and murmurs, all warm and breathy in his ear, “We’re gonna make it work, Sammy. You’ll see. It’s gonna be good.”

Sam never could deny Dean when he was making promises like that. He curls up into Dean’s side, as tightly as his size will allow, and falls asleep to the soothing rumble of Dean’s voice talking about carpets.

 

It becomes abundantly clear the next day in town that, for all their enthusiasm, neither of them really knows what they’re doing.

They split up to do the shopping. Dean fares slightly better, with a recent year of domestic living experience under his belt, and comes back with dish soap and laundry soap and bathroom towels. But he also buys too many cups and not enough plates, coffee grounds but no coffee pot, and forgets silverware entirely.

Sam does the groceries, but two minutes in the store without a plan and he starts to get overwhelmed, grabbing things almost at random. He buys sheets and blankets and pillowcases too, but he forgets to buy the pillows. It all takes far longer than Sam thought it would, and the weight of the shopping bags feel tremendous, making his body ache by the end of the day.

The only thing they both get entirely right is the tools and weaponry for zombie-proofing the house. And they both buy a plant.

Sam can’t help but grin when he makes his way back to the car and finds Dean leaning against the hood, clutching his own brown pot with its little tuft of green jutting proudly out of the top. There’s an unspoken understanding between them that plants are something normal people own, people who can afford to stay in the same place and water them everyday.

Sam holds both plants on his lap for the ride home, the rest of their mismatched purchases piled in the backseat.

“Bet mine’s gonna be bigger,” Dean smirks.

“Maybe,” Sam replies, running his hand over the plant. It’s short and spiky, and reminds him of Dean’s hair. “If you can even manage to keep it alive.”

“I’m doing okay so far with you,” Dean counters. He means it as a joke but it hits a little too close to home. He freezes, hands going rigid on the wheel, but at that moment they’re pulling into their driveway in front of their house and the sun is setting on their overgrown fields, so Sam just flicks the springy leaves of his little plant and says, “Yeah, you are.”

It takes a few more trips to town, with Sam insisting they “make _lists_ , Dean, so that way you don’t come back with another fucking chainsaw,” before they really start to settle into the house. Sam buys Dean a TV, Dean buys him a bookshelf, and they set to work on their improvements. Sam, limited because of his three broken fingers, works mostly on interior things, like repainting the walls or scrubbing the mold from the shower, while Dean goes all out making the house into a zombie fall-out shelter. 

The first ones show up on the seventh day, while Sam is helping Dean put an electrified fence all the way around their property. Dean leaps up and brandishes his sword like action hero, Sam hunches in on himself and tries to shut down the voices in his brain.

He knows the second the creature appears even though he’s got his eyes shut and is rocking back and forth on his knees. He thinks he’s almost figured out a way to attack the seething masses in his mind without physically harming himself, but he loses concentration at the last moment when he hears Dean yell, and ends up using their discarded nail gun to put a nail through his right foot.

He’s only unconscious for an hour this time, and knows who and where he is twenty minutes after that, but he gets a fever and a wicked cough that last for a week. Dean confines him to the couch in a fury, disappearing for several hours before returning to dump several large tomes quite painfully in Sam’s lap.

“Research,” he orders.

Sam dutifully pages through the books and reads about Hell whenever Dean comes stomping through the living room, either on his way to the kitchen or to the office, which he dubbed “the War Room” after converting it to a veritable weapons bunker. But Sam finds nothing new written on the ancient pages, and when Dean’s not around he sets the books aside and practices pushing against the black pit in his head, seeing if he can’t get all the slimy, jittering things that live in there to scream.

They watch movies at night when Sam’s fever is at it’s highest and Dean’s concern outweighs his anger. Tonight it’s _Fight Club_ , one of Dean’s favorites. Sam lays on the couch underneath his favorite blanket, ironically not one of the new ones he’s bought but an old ratted one from the trunk of the Impala that smells like gunpowder and road dust. Dean starts the night sitting on the floor, but after Sam coughs until he gags and Dean makes him swallow half a bottle of cough syrup, he moves to the couch. It’s a bit of a mess getting situated, given that they’re both over six feet tall and Sam is half-drunk on Robitussin but eventually Dean gets them settled with himself propped against the arm of the couch, Sam between his legs and laying against his chest.

On the screen, Edward Norton is about to get his chemical burn. Pain twinges through the broken bones in Sam’s own hand, and he thinks about how much Dean is like Tyler Durden. Unpredictable, irresistible, and so goddamn beautiful. With a smile and a .45 Dean could take down a city, and Sam would be more than happy to stand at his side and watch it burn.

He doesn’t realize he’s speaking out loud until Dean puts a hand on his chin and kisses him, cutting off his rambling words. The cough syrup makes it cherry-flavored and sticky sweet. Dean takes his time, going deep and thorough, kissing Sam like he’s trying to tell their future in the shape of Sam’s mouth. Sam finds himself feeling hot all over.

“Dean,” he whimpers, not quite sure what he’s asking for, but Dean just makes shushing noises and smoothes his hands down Sam’s chest. Sam’s fever is making him sweat, and his t-shirt is sticking to his skin. He kicks off his blanket then grabs Dean’s thighs, suddenly feeling the need to be anchored to something.

“Dean,” he says again, the cough syrup making his tongue thick and unwieldy. “They want me to be their leader. They want me to let the darkness out, and—”

Dean shushes him again, and presses a light kiss to his neck. “Maybe you should,” he murmurs. “They can’t hurt you if you’re their king, right?” His hands slip under Sam’s t-shirt and brush over his stomach, but when Sam makes a choked sound and twitches against his chest he starts to pull away.

“No, Dean, please…” Sam tightens his grip on Dean’s thighs. He still doesn’t know exactly what he wants, he just knows he needs this, Dean holding him, touching him, making him feel human. “If I give in, then it will take over, and it won’t be _me_ anymore, and I won’t—”

“Hey, it’s alright.” Dean puts his hands back on Sam’s skin, palms sliding over his hipbones. The only light in the room is coming from the television where the narrator and Tyler Durden are making soap, and it makes Dean’s skin look grey and unnatural. “I’ve got you, Sammy.”

“Not leaving,” Sam mumbles, reaching one arm up to curl it around Dean’s neck. “And I’m not evil.”

“I know.” Dean kisses him again, soft and sweet. There’s so much love and desperation in Dean’s every move Sam wants to cry. “We’ll figure this out, Sammy, I promise.”

Sam’s head, with all its monsters and regrets, feels too heavy to hold up, so he lets it drop back against Dean’s shoulder. His eyes drift closed as Dean continues moving his hands across Sam’s skin, Sam pushing into them and then back against Dean’s chest. His fever and the meds and the voices in his head all swirl together and leave Sam drifting in a haze. He thinks he could fall apart like this, crumble into ash like the bones they burn. He’s clinging to the edges of life with anger and heartbreak like a vengeful spirit. He was never meant to last this long, and he can feel himself starting to fade away.

The only solid thing is Dean, beneath him and around him. Sam rocks harder into Dean, needing to feel this is real. His head is so confused with black-winged creatures trying to climb the walls, leaving sticky strands of blood-soaked memories in their wake. Hell is still trying to claim him for its own, but it tried for centuries when Sam was in its grasp and it never succeeded. Someone else had got there first.

On screen, Tyler Durden is kissing the narrator’s hand and pouring on the lye. Dean’s touch is similarly taking Sam apart piece by piece. But Dean always puts Sam back together again. No matter how broken Sam is, even when it would be easier— and it would so much _easier_ — for Dean to walk away, he’ll get down on his knees every time and pick Sam up instead.

Sam tries to tell Dean he knows what he’s doing for him, but his breath is coming fast and hard now and he can’t get the words out. For a second he can’t hear Dean breathing and his feverish brain thinks wildly _I’ve killed him. I’ve finally become so broken he couldn’t fix me and he died trying._ He arches off the couch with a groan but Dean pulls him back, and Sam realizes he is breathing, he’s panting just as hard as Sam is, smothering it against Sam’s neck.

 _This is your life,_ Tyler Durden tells them from the screen.

“It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean says against his jaw, as Sam shudders and clutches at Dean, trying to pull him closer, pull him through his skin and keep him safe there forever.

_And it’s ending one minute at a time._

“I’ve got you.”


	5. Chapter 5

There are leeches in Sam’s throat. He can feel their teeth in his skin, his airways slowly closing as their slick bodies swell with his blood. He claws at his neck, trying to break through and pull them out, but his efforts only make them sink their teeth in deeper. They’re draining him dry, and he has to tell someone. He can’t keep walking around with this inside of him, pretending everything is normal. 

The leeches are moving, inching up Sam’s throat into his nose and towards his eyes. They’ll turn his eyes black like blood-blisters if they can get there. Sam has to stop that from happening. He looks for something sharp, something he can jam inside his head and use to scrape out all the festering putridness, but his arms are suddenly being held down by a thousand hairy things that swarm over him like ants.

He tries to scream through a throat now completely closed, and wakes himself up when he actually does.

His arms are being pinned, but by human hands, and Sam only thrashes for a few seconds before going limp. Dean holds onto him for a minute more, pushing down firmly, then he backs away to the other side of the bed.

They’re both getting good at this.

“Are you bleeding?” Dean asks. Sam sighs, wishing like they could skip the checklist and he could just fall back asleep, but he knows Dean would never allow it. He dutifully examines his nose, mouth, and under his fingernails.

“No, not bleeding.”

“Fever?”

There are some nights when it’s so high Sam’s skin hurts to touch and he sits and stares at nothing until Dean shoves him in an ice bath. Tonight is not one of those nights. “Low hundreds, max.”

“Nausea?”

Sam thinks about the leeches, remembering the feel of their bodies pushing against one another as they greedily sought out more of his skin. His stomach lurches half-heartedly, but it’s shriveled and sore and he hasn’t eaten anything solid in days. “Under control.”

“Pain?”

This is always the worst question. Everything else is something they can handle, something they can almost pretend is part of a routine illness that has a treatment. Hope for a cure. But Sam’s pain, bone-deep and iron-strong, is not so easy to pretend away. Sam knows Dean hates that’s there’s so little he can do to help when it strikes. Sam has tried lying before, passing it off as less serious than it was, but Dean’s reaction when he caught on was far worse than when Sam tells the truth. And Dean always catches on.

“Six out of ten.”

Dean sighs, and in the dim light of their bedroom Sam can see him drop his head between his shoulders. “Can you drink something?”

Sam thinks about leeches again, and closes his eyes. “Not now.”

“Sammy—”

“Later, Dean. Just want to go back to sleep for now.”

Dean doesn’t answer for a long moment, which means he’s going to give in. Sam knew he would. Tonight is one of the easy ones.

“Roll over on your stomach,” Dean commands. Sam cracks an eye open to look at him where he’s sitting up shirtless on his side of the bed. They never got around to buying curtains for the second floor, so the bedroom window remains naked and open, letting light from the wide Kansas sky filter in and brush across the planes of Dean’s body. His face is in shadow, but Sam knows what he’s asking for anyway.

“Dean, you don’t have to—”

“I want to. Come on, roll over. You said it helps.”

“It does,” Sam quickly assures him. He pushes himself up to his elbows, then brings one arm over his chest and slowly starts to roll. As painful and awkward as he must look, Dean holds back and lets Sam do it by himself. The moment his stomach touches the mattress, however, Dean’s hands are on his back.

“I’m okay now,” Sam mumbles into the pillow that smells like them. He feels like reminding Dean he never signed up to be Sam’s caretaker like this, but the one time he said that Dean just gave him a strange look that was almost a smile and went back to changing the bandage around Sam’s foot.

Now he runs his hands over Sam’s sides and down his legs, starting at the ankles then working back up in a light, easy massage. Dean likes to touch Sam on nights like these, when he’s not vomiting or hemorrhaging or delirious. He goes slow, mapping out Sam’s skin, taking extra care around the hole in his foot, the scar on his leg, the splints on his hand. Things don’t feel quite real here in the early morning hours, stuck somewhere between the heated terror of Sam’s nightmares and the cold reality of his waking hours.

Here, Dean will do things he’d never do in the daylight, like rub his thumb over the part of the scar that curves around the side of Sam’s thigh, then lean down and press a kiss where it ends. Some nights his kisses continue further, from Sam’s leg up his back and around to his mouth. In the quiet darkness of the barely-dawn Dean will sometimes let Sam kiss him back, will tangle their bodies together and slide skin against skin until they’re both shaking with the terrifying wonder of holding each other close. In those moments they let their grasping hands and desperate mouths say all the things they can’t put into words.

Touching each other is becoming easier, almost second nature. It’s a small bit of comfort in their own perfectly fucked up way. They’ve lost too much in the past, including each other, that it makes sense to grab on now to what they can while they’re both still here. While they still have time. Despite all the death they’ve seen it’s always been fast, never like this, a creeping, gnawing death that offers them so much time to think, to despair, and worst of all, to hope. It’s like Dean’s deal all over again except this time it’s worse, because with every zombie and every creature and every hitch in Sam’s breath it’s right here in front of them, shoved in their faces until it’s impossible for them to look away. On most days touching each other is a necessity that keeps both of them sane, a bright spark of reassurance in their otherwise darkening world.

Sam’s been taking out creatures without physically damaging himself for some weeks now. The first time he killed one of them using only his mind, it had appeared while he and Dean were eating breakfast on the front porch, enjoying an unseasonably warm fall day.

The obligatory zombies showed up first, but Sam and Dean were so well practiced and well prepared to handle them, Sam wasn’t sure why the Hell-creatures still bothered creating them. Half the ranks died on the electric fence, and Dean was ready for the rest with his sharpest machete and a wickedly spiked shield. Sam’s pretty sure Dean would be loving that part if not for what always came after.

Sam didn’t bother to stand when he felt the creature coming. He didn’t even look up, just wrapped his arms around his knees and buried his face in them, concentrating on the wound inside of him that lay festering with the jagged, poisoned pieces of Hell. It was like having Lucifer inside him all over again, but this time he didn’t let Dean get beaten to a bloodied mess before he emerged, victorious.

He didn’t lose consciousness when the creature vanished into the air, and he even managed to pull himself to his feet as Dean came running over, eyes scanning Sam’s body for the latest injury.

“I did it,” Sam tried to say, but he coughed instead and blood sprayed from his mouth and nose, splattering across the porch steps like a star map.

The bleeding went on long enough that day Dean ended up giving him a field transfusion, not wanting to deal with the time and questions of a hospital. _This is my body_ , Sam thought. _This is my blood._ He held onto to Dean’s hand like he was a little kid again. He drank the orange juice Dean gave him afterwards and he tried his hardest to keep it down. He fell asleep that night with his head on Dean’s shoulder, a shared blanket hiding both their puncture wounds from view.

In some ways, it’s gotten easier since then. Though each fight with a creature leaves Sam weak and with a killer headache, most the immediate consequences have lessened, only to spread themselves at random across the rest of Sam’s days. His hemorrhages, thankfully, are not that common, and Dean’s got them a store of blood on hand now nicked from a hospital several towns over. The nausea is almost constant, but Sam pushes through it, making jokes about how its a good thing they don’t eat at restaurants anymore because he’d offend the cooks by puking at the sight of their food. The pain he can deal with on all but the worst days. He’s a Winchester, after all, and they’re nothing if not good at dealing with mind-numbing, soul-crushing pain.

It’s the blackouts that are the worst.

They come at any time, and can last for a few minutes to several hours. They leave Sam disoriented and terrified of what he’s done in the time he can’t remember. Dean hardly leaves his side anymore, except in absolutely necessary circumstances like when they run out of food or medicine to keep Sam’s fever in check. He’s spent an hour talking Sam down from a panic attack, assuring him he does nothing during his blackouts but sit and stare.

Sam knows those moments are even worse for Dean than they are for him, because during those moments Sam doesn’t recognize him.

It makes times like now matter that much more, when Dean is touching Sam with something approaching reverence, and Sam is breathing in time with his fingers. Dean’s hands have reached his back, and they knead gently at the muscles, thumbs flicking over the knobs of Sam’s spine. He shifts, uncomfortable, because he’s lost a lot of weight these past few weeks and it makes him embarrassed to be spread out beneath Dean like this, thin and weak.

“You’re still taller,” Dean reminds him teasingly, poking him between the shoulders blades then softening the gesture by leaning down and kissing the back of his neck.

“Can still kick your ass,” Sam yawns. “At rock paper scissors.”

Dean snorts, then, finished with his massage, starts rolling Sam carefully onto his side. 

“Maybe you should try that next time Hell’s army comes calling.” Dean runs one hand through Sam’s hair, pushing it back from his face. Both of them pretend not to notice when a clump of it pulls away with Dean’s fingers.

“Maybe I will.” Sam’s almost asleep again now, but he pushes himself closer to Dean, practically head-butting him until he can get his ear to Dean’s chest and find his heartbeat. Sam’s own heart often skips beats these days, fluttering in his chest like a bird getting restless in its cage.

In a way it’s fitting, he thinks. Sam was cursed at six months and died for the first time at twenty-three, and he should never have made it this far. Dean might have had angels on his side, but it’s only by the execrations of Hell and the unrelenting love of his brother that Sam has been given a second and third chance.

His body isn’t going to hold out much longer, Sam can tell, though he and Dean don’t talk about that like they don’t talk about a hundred other things: the way they painted angel-warding symbols all over the house, how Dean manages to pay for their food and hides all newspapers from Sam, what people like Jess and their mother and their father might say if they could see the two of them now.

In the back of his mind, Sam’s always known it would end like this, in blood and fire. He’s just glad he’ll go out fighting the forces of Hell rather than leading them, and he’ll do it with Dean by his side.

He presses his own kiss to the place where he can hear the steady thump of Dean’s heart, then bites down lightly until Dean growls and flicks his ear. Things don’t feel quite real here in the early morning hours. 

Sam can almost believe they’re going to be all right.

***

“Maybe that was the last one.”

Dean has his hands on Sam’s shoulders, checking his eyes, his mouth, his skin. He says the same thing now after every creature Sam kills, his voice cracking with desperate hope.

Sam doesn’t bother answering him this time. He’s rubbing at his left eye, trying to clear the blurriness from his vision. His right eye is a lost cause; it went cloudy two nights ago. It was hardly the first part of Sam’s body to show the strain of his constant internal warfare, but it was the one that freaked Sam out the most. Dean had removed all the mirrors from the house when Sam first started developing the sores, so Sam snuck into the garage while Dean was sleeping and looked in the Impala’s side mirror. It was almost like one of the zombies was looking back at him— colorless skin stretched tightly over his bones, mottled scabs speckled across his jaw and down his neck, hair thin and lank around his face.

It was a disturbing sight, but Sam had breathed a sigh of relief. His visionless right eye was unfocussed, but it was still there, and it wasn’t black.

“Come on.” Dean is trying to pull him up from where he’s collapsed on the living room floor after destroying the creature that had been coming up their porch steps. They’re getting bolder, angrier, but not one has managed to enter the house yet with the myriad of protections Sam and Dean put down when they first moved in.

Sam goes through the usual check of possible complications as he gets painfully to his feet. He’s not bleeding, not vomiting, not blacking out. He can’t quite remember what they’d been doing so far today before the creature showed up, but that’s normal. That’s nothing.

“Dean—”

“We were going to have lunch,” Dean answers the unspoken question. His hands skim over Sam’s ribs as Sam leans on him. His thin enough now he thinks Dean might be able to feel the angel sigils burned into the bones right through his skin. “You didn’t eat breakfast, remember? You were… upset.”

Sam doesn’t remember, but he’s getting good at filling in the holes the dark things inside his mind keep chewing in his life. His right arm is sore and there’s blood under his fingernails and a stinging sensation near his hairline. He wonders which corner of the house he chose to crawl into this time. His memories of Hell have begun seeping through the pit in his mind, carried along by vicious creatures that smear them across the backs of his eyes and make him forget he’s no longer an animal, trapped in a cage. 

“I’m sorry,” he says to Dean. It’s all he can do now, and it’s not enough. It was never enough to make up for all the things he did, and all the ways he was wrong. Sam knows he should have been apologizing to Dean his whole life, but even if he had Dean would respond exactly the way he does now.

He ignores the apology, and lowers Sam into a kitchen chair. “Apple okay?” he asks, opening the fridge.

“Sure.” Sam’s stomach is already starting to rebel at the thought, but he’s faced demons and the Devil and went to Hell, and he made it back again. The least he can do is eat an apple for his brother.

“You should eat something too,” he tells Dean as he takes the first tiny bite. Dean cut the apples into slices, warmed them up and covered them in cinnamon sugar. They’re soft and sweet, almost like apple pie. “You’re starting to look as sick as me.”

“I’ll eat later.” The lines around Dean’s mouth tighten, and Sam feels immediately guilty for his joke. If Dean wants to pretend everything is fine while he watches over Sam when he blackouts and rubs his back when he pukes and mops up his blood when he hemorrhages, then Sam is going to let him.

Sam manages to get down three slices before he gags and doubles over, clutching his stomach. Dean rubs his neck and his back, then takes him back to the living room to lie down on the couch. They don’t usually watch movies anymore, because Sam has trouble focusing on the screen with only one working eye, and sometimes the voices on the TV get all jumbled up with the voices in Sam’s head until he starts screaming just to drown them all out. Sam asked Dean to read to him one night instead, and now Dean does it almost every day. 

They started with a few of Sam’s old favorites, things he had stashed in the trunk of the Impala that Dean religiously kept during his absence. After working through _The Lord of the Rings_ and _The Dark Tower_ Dean drove to town and came back with a pile of used paperbacks, a surprisingly diverse collection that included everything from cheesy smut romances— Sam laughed so hard the first time Dean read aloud about the hero’s “pulsating member” he almost passed out and had to sit with his head between his knees for the rest of the chapter— to classics by Hawthorne and Kerouac.

Tonight, they’re reading another book Sam dug from the Impala, one pushed into the very back of the glove compartment with a tattered cover and age-yellowed pages. Dean reads each novel differently, altering his voice to match the subject matter, making it over-the-top and ridiculous for the romance novels, softer or scarier or more serious for others.

Tonight he reads from _The Catcher in the Rye_ like he’s reading about a friend. 

“ ‘I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all,’ ” Dean says, holding the book with one hand and rubbing the soft skin of Sam’s inner ankle with the other. “ ‘Thousands of little kids and nobody’s around— nobody big, I mean— except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.’ ”

Sam thinks about the wheat fields by their house, and imagines running through them, the sun on the back of his neck, dirt under his feet, a cliff’s edge waiting for him at the end. He struggles to quiet his breath as it rattles through his lungs, not wanting to miss a single word as Dean continues in his rumble-warmed voice.

“ ‘What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and _catch_ them. ‘” 

Sam’s been falling and jumping off things his whole life, and Dean’s caught him every time, except once, in Stull Cemetery, when Sam made him promise not to. And that’s landed them here, with Sam fighting to keep from scratching a hole in his skin straight through to his brain and Dean reading words from his childhood book because it’s all he has left to offer.

“ ‘That's all I'd do all day,’ ” Dean reads as Sam bites his lip and tries to ignore the ever-present scent of death and the way the shadows on the floorboards look like pools of blood. “ ‘I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.’ ”

When Dean finishes the chapter, Sam crawls into his lap and kisses him. Dean holds onto him a little too tightly, but Sam doesn’t ask him to let go.

\-------------

Sam sleeps straight through the night for the first time in months, and a creature appears in their kitchen during breakfast.

Dean leaps out of the chair with a yell, but Sam doesn’t move, already locked inside where thousands of glistening black bodies are surging forward, jaws open and claws out. They’re not just in his mind anymore, they’re spread out through his body, rippling under his skin, gnawing holes in his organs and slipping inside. When his heart pumps blood it catches on legs and hair and pincers. Sam can feel his body start to stop, everything swelling and shoving closer to the surface, ready to break out and consume him.

The voices are shrieking, howling, a violent hurricane of noise but Sam can’t hear make out their words. He dreamt while he slept soundly last night, and he didn’t dream about them.

He saw his mother in their old house in Lawrence, blonde and beautiful and telling Sam she was sorry. _It’s okay_ , Sam replied. He saw his Dad in the hospital, looking anxious and determined, asking Sam if he’d mind getting him some coffee. _It’s okay_ , Sam agreed. He saw Jessica in their old apartment, prepping the kitchen to make cookies and asking him to come home safely. _It’s okay_ , he assured her.

He saw Dean, standing over him in Bobby’s panic room, looking terrified and hopeful and ready to do anything, to take on the world.

 _It’s okay_. Sam hugged him, and for the first time in his life he didn’t feel at all worried, or angry, or scared. He felt at peace.

Sam reaches for that feeling now, reaches back into the dream where he and the people he loved were still alive and still loving him. Sam couldn’t save them then, and he can’t save them now, but he can do this one thing and he can save what little is left of himself, so when dies he can do it with their faces in his mind and their names on his lips.

The peace is a blazing-hot ball inside of him, a dense collection of matter seconds from fusion into a nuclear sun. Sam fights for the extra little push that will start the reaction, shutting out images of Hell and corpses and death and focusing on creating a spark so he can have the flame. The creature in their kitchen makes a noise, takes a step towards Sam and reaches out its hand. From somewhere else, Dean calls out his name.

Ignition.

Sam is thrown from his chair as the explosion rips through him. A holy fire, a cleansing fire, it burns through the black bodies beneath his skin without hesitation. They shriek as they die, legs and pincers flailing wildly as they struggle to cling to the molten insides of Sam’s body. Poison spews from their corpses and bubbles through Sam’s veins but the fire cauterizes it like a wound, leaving them to dissolve into ash.

Fire has defined Sam, owned him, first by taking his mother, then Jess, then torturing his father and his brother and finally Sam himself in the never-ending inferno of Hell. His life has been shaped in the flames, but this time is the last time. The fire licks into Sam’s brain and his body is bowing and his bones are melting and his skin is cracking with the heat. He opens his eyes, almost certain they’re boiling away.

The creature vanishes in front of him, less than ashes and dust.

And then everything is silent, until Sam draws in a breath.

He’s on his back on the floor, hollowed-out and cold. Dean is next to him in seconds, helping him sit up, touching him everywhere, feeling for bruises or wounds. But there aren’t any this time. Not on the outside. 

“Maybe that was the last one,” Dean whispers desperately as his fingers press along the back of Sam’s scalp.

“Yeah,” Sam croaks through a throat that’s blackened and burned. “I think it was.”

Dean pauses, shifts onto his knees so he can look into Sam’s eyes. “Sammy.” He’s still speaking at a whisper, like if he says it any louder it might shatter the fragile hope Sam can see building in his face. “What did you just say? Do you… is it… is it over?”

“It’s over.” Sam coughs, and there’s black blood in his mouth but Dean doesn’t notice because he’s hugging Sam with all his strength, speaking frantically against his ear.

“I knew it, Sammy, I knew you could do it. Things are going to be okay now. You’re going to get better, and we’re going to get past this and—”

“Dean.” Sam coughs again, and Dean notices the blood this time when some of it splatters on his shirt. He pulls back to look at Sam again, and there’s heartbreak in his eyes. “It’s over.”

“No, Sammy, no.” Dean shakes his head, lurches back into motion. “No, you’re gonna be fine. Let’s get you cleaned up, and—”

“I want to go outside.” Sam is having trouble moving with the flame-torched ruins of his inside, but he manages to get his hands clasped weakly on Dean’s shoulders.

“You’re gonna be fine.” It’s a plea more than a command, said with tears already starting in Dean’s eyes. Sam tries to smile at him, let him know as usual that he’s not fooling anybody. The Winchesters know death when they see it.

“Please, Dean. I want to go outside.”

Dean has never been that great at denying Sam the things asks for, and this time is no exception. _After all_ , Sam thinks weakly as Dean wraps one arm around his back and slides the other behind his knees. _It’s my dying wish._

He’s thin enough now that Dean can carry him with ease. Sam wants to go into the wheat fields so he can imagine he’s running through them, but Dean breaks down on the front porch and almost falls so Sam figures that’s good enough. They settle side-by-side on the steps, and when Sam puts his arms around Dean’s neck Dean hugs him back like he’s never going to let go.

Sam’s brain feels dry and brittle like leaves left too long in the sun. He’s unfocussed and confused, drifting on the uneven sound of his scorched and hollowed heart. It takes him a moment to realize Dean is mouthing words into the skin of his neck.

“It’s okay,” Dean is repeating, his voice breaking as he shudders into Sam. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”

Sam kind of wants to laugh; except Dean is crying and so Sam thinks he might be crying a little bit too. This is what Dean has been telling him since he was a little kid sniffling over his scraped knees. Dean’s been saying these words Sam’s whole life, but it’s never really been Sam that’s needed to hear them.

“Dean.” Sam tries to speak, but the blood in his mouth coats his tongue and gums around his teeth, making his words garbled and thick. He thinks back to his dream, to the sense of peace he found that let him break free from the chains of Hell for the last time. “It is okay. Dean—“

Sam starts to pull back and Dean plunges both his hands into Sam’s hair, dragging them together until their foreheads touch.

“Not like this,” he hisses, inches from Sam’s lips. “Sammy, I pulled you out Hell, it’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Yes, it is.” Sam pushes his head against Dean’s with the little strength he has left, making Dean _feel_ the pressure. “It’s supposed to be just like this.”

“Fuck you,” Dean sobs. He tugs once on Sam’s hair, a sharp sting that lights up bright and clear in Sam’s damaged mind, then he tilts his head in and kisses him. Sam opens his mouth and does his best to kiss back, but he’s no match this time for Dean’s fury and heartbreak and ferocious, all-consuming love.

Dean splits his lip against Sam’s teeth and his blood floods into their mouths, mixing with Sam’s own. He isn’t surprised to find they taste no different. _This is my body. A catcher in the rye. Voices in Sam’s head. Death on Dean’s skin. Dean kissing Sam like it’s the end of the world._

“Dean,” Sam murmurs when he gets a moment to breathe. His chest cracks and burns with the effort. “Dean, I want you to—“

“Don’t you dare,” Dean snarls, biting at Sam’s lips until he whimpers. “I’m not promising you anything. Don’t you fucking _dare_.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Sam can feel himself slipping away, and though he has no idea where he’s headed it doesn’t matter. He knows Dean will follow him, like always. “I want you to tell me again.”

“Tell you what?” Dean’s hands have moved from his hair to his back, his sides, stroking and pulling like his touch alone might be enough to anchor Sam in this world.

“Tell me I’m okay.”

Dean freezes, then a shudder rips through his body like an earthquake. His hands come up to cup Sam’s jaw and he leans in for a final kiss, soft and deep and desperate.

“You’re okay, Sammy,” Dean whispers, right against his lips. He’s crying again, but he makes his voice steady, the way he’s always done. “You’re okay.”

Sam closes his eyes and puts his head down on Dean’s shoulder. When the darkness starts to rise around him, he’s not afraid.

But then someone shouts his name.

Sam knows it’s not in his head because Dean stiffens beneath him and a surprised breath huffs out of his chest.

“SAM!”

Sam recognizes the voice but he can’t process it, and when he pulls back from Dean the sight of someone striding up their front lawn makes even less sense. It’s only when the person is stomping up the steps that Sam recognizes them.

“Bobby? What are you—”

Bobby pulls back his fist and punches Sam across the jaw, and the world goes black.


	6. Chapter 6

The first thing Sam notices when he wakes up is the Devil’s trap painted on the ceiling above his head. It’s done in white paint that’s gone grey with age and the contamination of countless souls trapped beneath its symbols and curves. It’s familiar to Sam like gas stations and bullet wounds, so familiar that he doesn’t understand it at first. He squints his eyes and the whole thing seems to pulse like a heart beating under water.

The second thing Sam notices is that he can’t reach up to touch the Devil’s trap, because he’s tied to a chair in Bobby’s study.

He jerks automatically, ropes cutting painfully into his wrists and legs. They’re tied mercilessly tight, and he already knows he’s not getting out of them without a knife. There’s one still strapped around his ankle, but he has no way of reaching it. Realizing there’s no gag in his mouth, Sam starts to yell for Dean.

“He ain’t coming, Sam.” Something that looks like Bobby appears in the doorway, a rifle held loosely in its hands. The expression it wears on Bobby’s face is tired and sick, with a redness to its eyes that suggests it’s been crying.

“What are you?” Sam demands. “What have you done to Bobby?”

“Nothing,” the Bobby-thing answers. It switches the rifle to one hand to flick some holy water over its arm then run a finger down a silver blade. “I’m not possessed, and I ain’t some shifter or anything that like neither. I’m all me, unfortunately.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sam spits. “And when Dean gets here, he’s going to _murder_ you.”

“Dean ain’t coming.” The Bobby-thing passes a hand over its face, and when it drops it back to the barrel of the gun he looks, if possible, even sicker than before. “Jesus, Sam, why did it have to come to this?”

“Come to what?” Sam is still scanning the room, still tugging on his robes, and he can’t help but notice there’s no sign of a struggle. It would be an almost unheard of occurrence for something supernatural to get the jump on Bobby Singer without him putting up a fight. “And what the hell have you done to Dean?”

“I haven’t touched him,” Bobby says in a voice Sam has only heard him use when he’s in the middle of burying a friend. He doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes, swallowing like he’s about to throw up.

“I don’t believe you!” Sam bellows back at him because he is kind of starting to, and it’s scaring the shit out of him. He wants to go back to the moment when he was safely dying in Dean’s arms, not this fucked up reality where Bobby ties him to a chair and acts like the world has ended. “Dean! Dean, get your ass in here! Dean!”

“I told you, he ain’t _coming_.” Bobby’s voice breaks and he puts his hand over his eyes again, but this time he doesn’t remove it for a long time. When his shoulders stop shaking and he finally looks back at Sam it’s with an expression Sam recognizes immediately from Hell. It’s the expression of a soul that knows something worse than it’s own nightmares is coming for blood, and there’s nothing that can stop it. “Sam… Dean’s dead.”

Sam goes cold, every muscle in his body freezing instantly to ice. For a second, he can’t speak, he can hardly even breathe, then what comes out is almost a scream. “You’re lying! What have you done to him? Dean! DEAN!”

“I didn’t do a damn thing to him, Sam.” Bobby sounds wrecked, and at the same time more helpless and more furious than Sam has ever heard him sound before. “You did. Dean’s been dead for five months.”

Sam can’t breathe. He’s tied to a chair and there’s a Devil’s trap on the ceiling and Bobby is holding a gun and he’s telling Sam Dean is dead and Sam can’t breathe.

“You’re lying,” he says again faintly.

“I wish I was. Hell, I’d give _anything_ to— But Dean was dead ten minutes after he pulled you outta Hell, when you put your hand through his chest like it was nothing.”  
Bobby’s voice goes gruffer, and though Sam’s vision has gone hazy he’s sure Bobby’s hands have tightened on the gun. “You murdered him, Sam. You left me here beaten half to death and you took off with your brother’s corpse riding shotgun.”

“No.” Sam’s is shaking his head, trying to block out Bobby’s words and all the images he’s shoving into Sam’s mind. “Dean’s fine, we’ve been traveling together, we have a house—“

“ _You’ve_ been traveling and _you_ have a house. All Dean’s got is some shoddy protections spells keeping the maggots and insects from eating what’s left of his face and a brother who can’t accept the fact that he’s a killer now. Think about it, Sam. Think about what you’ve been doing.”

Sam keeps shaking his head, but with his hands tied down he can’t block his ears and Bobby’s words slither inside and take hold. He sees the panic room when he first woke up, and he sees it with blood smeared across the walls and a piece of Dean’s ribs on the floor near his foot. He sees the first motel room they stayed in, and the fleur-de-lis trapping the scent of decay from Dean laying still on the bed, one of his eye sockets a gaping hole. He sees their house, him carrying Dean from the couch to the bed, the kitchen to the front porch.

The images sear across Sam’s brain like a brush fire, and he gags from the pain.

“I’m not…” he chokes out, eyes rolling in his skull as he forces himself to forget the horrifying images this whole awful situation is making his mind conjure. “I haven’t killed anyone.”

“Oh believe me, Sam, you have, and you ain’t exactly been subtle about it. You threw yourself through a window in a diner in North Dakota and murdered two innocent folks in the parking lot. Three other bodies were found in a river in Nebraska. And now there’s been a bunch of disappearances in Kansas. Seems anyone that ventures down a certain side-road by a certain house don’t come back again.”

“That’s not… Those were _zombies_ , they came after us, I wouldn’t…”

Bobby snorts. The sound is ugly and full of pain. “There ain’t no such thing like the monsters you’ve convinced yourself you’ve been fighting, and you know it. They were only zombies because that’s what you wanted them to be. Or because you know that’s what Dean woulda wanted them to be.” 

“No, Dean didn’t…” The pain in Sam’s head throbs like a blister ready to burst. “He was _happy_ , Bobby, before they came. He was— I don’t remember him being so happy in a long time.”

“Goddammit, Sam!” Bobby’s body jerks like all of his emotion is suddenly too much to keep inside, and the butt of the rifle slams into the wall. “Cas was right. You have no idea.” His swings the gun back around, training it on Sam. “We should never have brought you back.”

“Bobby, please.” Sam twists his hands against the ropes until he feels blood starting to run down his skin. The blister in his head ruptures, spilling something black and slick, and leaving behind a deep hole. “Please, I haven’t done anything. I’ve been _fighting_ these things from Hell, with Dean. He’s fine, Bobby, I swear—”

“You are so broken, boy.” Bobby gives him one look of utter sadness before his face goes cold and he cocks the gun. “And we all own a little blame for thinking we could pull you out of Hell and you wouldn’t be. Dean’s paid his price. Now it’s time I pay mine.”

“Bobby, please!” Sam wrenches at the robes, the pain sending bright sparks into the dark pit inside of him. “Don’t do this! I haven’t done anything, I swear! I’m not evil!”

“I’ll burn your body with your brother’s,” Bobby murmurs quietly. “The way it should have been.”

There’s a blast, and everything goes red. Sam thinks he sees the Devil’s trap on the ceiling split from the impact, but the next thing he knows he’s standing in the middle of the room. There’s a bloodied knife in his hand.

He looks down to find a body sprawled at his feet, and he panics for a moment, eyes burning and throat closing before something shifts into place and he sees the streaming skin. It’s not Bobby. It was a shifter after all.

“Sam!”

He drops the knife at that sound and runs to the front doors, bursting into the yard and looking around wildly. He spots the Impala first, and two steps later he’s standing in front of his brother.

Dean grabs onto Sam’s arm. “Are you alright?” he asks.

“Yes.” Sam grabs him back. Dean feels real, solid, and alive. “I’m fine.”

“I thought it was Bobby too, man, and then he grabbed you and—”

“No, Dean. I’m fine.” Sam smiles as he starts to realize it himself. His head doesn’t hurt anymore, there’s no blood in his mouth and he feels like he can draw breath all the way into his lungs. There’s a slight pain and lot of pressure on his shoulder, almost as if he’s holding something heavy up, but that’s nothing. That he can ignore.

“You mean—?” Dean quickly checks him over, then his face splits into an answering grin. “I told you Sammy! I knew you’d get better!”

Sam laughs, and pulls Dean in for a hug. For a second he thinks he catches the whiff of a rotting corpse. It makes him jerk back and there’s a moment, a tiny fraction of a moment where he sees Dean with his skin grey and hanging off his bones, his chest cracked open and dismantled like a car in a shop, one eye clouded and lifeless and the other one missing entirely from his face.

But then Sam blinks, and it’s gone.

“You’re okay,” Dean tells him, his smile brighter than the sun.

“Of course I am.” Sam pulls him in for another hug, pressing in as close as he can get. He can only feel one heartbeat between the two of them, but that’s okay. They can share. 

Dean tilts his face up and Sam kisses him, full and deep.

“I’m not leaving you,” Sam promises against Dean’s lips while Dean breathes his air. “Not ever.”


End file.
